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Yolo County DA announces launch of race blind program for filing charges

Article published September 9, 2021; The Daily Democrat
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Yolo County District Attorney Jeff Reisig announced the launch of a Race Blind Charging program this week, which aims to eliminate any implicit bias based on race when deciding to file charges against suspects.

“We started to work on this program almost two years ago with conversations with the Stanford Computational Policy Lab, who built the redaction engine that powers the race-blind charging process,” Reisig emphasized Thursday morning during a press conference at his Woodland office.

“Their technological expertise and commitment to criminal justice reform and this particular issue makes them a national leader and we have been so grateful to collaborate with them over the life of this project.”

The program was created due to concerns that prosecutors have discretion to charge or dismiss criminal cases. Implicit or explicit racial bias may sway a prosecutor’s decision — something that has been an issue in the nation’s criminal justice system for years.

Stanford Computational Policy Lab’s (SCPL) redaction technology helps eliminate the possibility of implicit bias by preventing prosecutors’ ability to see a suspect’s name, hair color, the neighborhood the crime was committed in, officers involved and the race or ethnicity of the suspect.

An example of what an automatically redacted narrative would look like compared to its original version. (Gerardo Zavala/Daily Democrat)

However, there are some exceptions that require prosecutors to have access to a suspect’s name and information due to the nature of the crimes.

“Our sex cases are excluded because we want to be able to see the suspects rap sheet before we charge a sex case,” Deputy District Attorney Carolyn Palumbo explained.

This is because they need to be able to look at previous crimes and prosecutions to better determine a charge for the suspect. The same goes for domestic violence cases and homicide cases, according to Palumbo.

Alex Chohlas-Wood, executive director of SCPL, said Yolo County’s District Attorney Office reached out and asked to partner after seeing a pilot proof of concept project the lab worked on with a small number of cases in 2019.

“We had already built the system, it was ready to go but we just needed to adapt it to Yolo County,” Chohlas-Wood stated.

The algorithm that he and his lab created automatically redacts race-related information from police reports forwarded by law enforcement agencies to the DA’s Office.

Yolo County is advanced in terms of its technology, which Chohlas-Wood argued is the reason the system was able to be implemented so easily.

“A lot of other DA’s that we’ve heard from have a lot of interest but just don’t have the technology yet to be able to support this kind of thing,” Chohlas-Wood explained. “Once the technology is there, it’s actually fairly easy to do it, but it’s hard if you’re dealing with paper records still.”

Sacramento County’s District Attorney Office is one example he noted as lacking the technology needed since they are still operating with paper records.

With the success Yolo County has seen in implementing the new system in Davis and West Sacramento, he hopes to expand the project to other offices with key features that will help with determining whether the goal of the project is being accomplished.

“Our next strategy is to try to select offices that have clear historical evidence of disparate treatment in the charging decisions so we can see if it actually reduces it,” he clarified.

However, Chohlas-Wood said they have not made any selections yet.

Chohlas-Wood said his lab is very interested in doing this kind of work because they’re at the intersection of technology and criminal justice reform and typically look for the ways technology can help advance the cause of criminal justice reform.

Reisig said he hopes Thursday’s press briefing about the new program makes prosecutors across the country realize that the technology SCPL created is game-changing — particularly because the lab has decided to make it open-sourced.

“It’s potentially transformative to the criminal justice system, coast to coast, and we would invite prosecutors everywhere to study it and to adopt it,” Reisig argued.

He noted that his office has also been communicating with the Multi-Cultural Community Council (MCCC) — a citizen advisory group — regarding their views of equity and fairness in the criminal justice system to ensure the work they were doing was helping make the criminal justice system fairer to people of color.

“They made it clear that many simply do not believe that the process is fair, especially for people of color, and that we should do whatever we can to design policies and processes to ensure that a person’s skin color does not affect the fairness of the process,” Reisig stated.

MCCC Chair Tessa Smith spoke well of the program during the press conference and said she hopes other district attorney offices across the country consider a similar approach.

“This is what trust and accountability look like, what transparency looks like,” Smith said. “This is how trust and relationships are built between a district attorney’s office and the community that it serves.”

“We know that color can color the perceptions of what is true, what is just and what is equitable. We’re working on it, but until we get it down, in Yolo County and every country across the country, we could do well to embed this instrument in our case management systems.”

Yolo County has only been using its race-based charging tool with cases referred to them by the Davis and West Sacramento police departments, according to Reisig.

“That initial pilot allowed us to further refine the redaction system and work out some of the bugs,” Reisig stated.

Davis Deputy Police Chief Paul Doroshov said his department is fully committed to partnering with the DA’s Office to make this happen.

“We believe in this program and we believe in anything that will help eliminate bias from the system.”

West Sacramento Police Chief Rob Strange argued that police must be bold and humble as they work to address profound issues of bias and concerns of institutionalized racism.

“We must look outside of our profession to invite the type of scrutiny that may be uncomfortable but will lead to positive evolution in our profession,” Strange asserted. “One that addresses equity without compromising on community safety.”

Reisig assured people that his office will be reporting all the data as they expand the program countywide through a “transparency portal” that will allow the public to see exactly how their decisions were affected or not affected.

“We believe that this technology has the potential to be an absolute game-changer.”

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