San Francisco DA Taps AI to Remove Bias in Charging

San Francisco worked with Stanford University to create a tool to filter out racial and age information from police reports to ensure bias doesn’t affect decisions about charging people with crimes.

Implicit bias is positive or negative associations that affect beliefs, attitudes, and actions toward other people, according to the “B.I.A.S. Act,” which stands for Breaking Implicit Attitudes and Stereotypes in the Justice System, a California bill that would require judges, lawyers, and court personnel get training every two years.

The biases are unconscious. “But what we know for sure is that when those biases filter themselves in the criminal ...