By Kaveh Waddell/Axios
Next month, the San Francisco District Attorney’s office will begin using a computer program developed at Stanford to strip police reports of names, neighborhoods and other proxies for race like eye color or hairstyle.
Why it matters: The effort is meant to remove bias. Prosecutors decide whether to charge suspects based on police reports and evidence — but they’re liable to be swayed by their own biases, which could lead them to bring charges more often against people of color.
The big picture: The U.S. criminal justice system is chock-full of racial disparities. Our prisons are disproportionately black and Hispanic — the two groups make up 56% of incarcerated people, but only 28% of the U.S. adult population.
Among other things, it’s the result of countless layers of systemic bias, from overpolicing in neighborhoods of color to sentencing disparities.
The SFDA–Stanford project addresses one link in the chain: prosecutorial decisions.
