Blind charging


With colleagues at SCPL, I helped design and implement a race-blind charging algorithm. Our tool automatically masks race-related information in incident narratives to reduce the influence of race on charging decisions, as I describe on Twitter here. We piloted the algorithm at the San Francisco District Attorney’s office, and it’s now in daily use at the Yolo County District Attorney’s office near Sacramento. Our paper on the project was included in the 2021 Proceedings of the AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society.
Blind charging is the subject of a new law in California, AB 2778, that mandates the use of blind charging across the state by 2025.
Blind charging has been covered in numerous press articles.