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Opening Thoughts
Skeptical on Racially Blind Charging
A few weeks ago we were at a round table discussion at USC with LA District Attorney George Gascón. He described in some detail the racial blind charging pilot they had experimented with when he was the SF DA and why eventually they went another route.
It was interesting because on a Zoom Townhall discussion with the Yolo County DA’s office, the Alex Chohlas-Wood, the Executive Director of the Stanford Computational Policy Lab, noted that they had originally done the program as a pilot project in San Francisco not naming Gascón by name.
Yolo County reached out to Stanford and “wanted to bring what we had done there to Yolo County.”
While what Gascón described seemed very arduous and cumbersome, Deputy DA Deanna Hays “Like anything, change is a little hard and it's a little cumbersome, but now that I read all of my police reports in this format, I'm very comfortable with it.”
Legislation is on the Governor’s desk supported by Assemblymember Kevin McCarty to make this statewide.
But does it work? That they don’t know because they don’t have enough data. They admit it. So why rush to push this through at the state level when you don’t know if the local pilot program works?
I get a little skeptical on these things when someone like Gascón really doesn’t think the policy is that helpful, but Yolo County is leading the way.
But consider some other factors. Is racial disparity really creeping in at the charging level?
Deanna Hays for example argued, “I don’t see any occasions of explicit bias. I’m not trying to be obstinate or uninformed, I just don’t see that.”
But she noted that they have a lot of training on implicit bias, “and it’s really eye opening. When you go through these trainings, how a person thinks, oh, I have zero biases. I am the most non-racist person ever, and you find little biases about yourself. And so I truly do believe there is implicit bias.”
But from the perspective of racial disparities - they tend to start with policing and where police operate and what police choose to arrest. That’s a huge factor that not touched by this.
Are prosecutors then making unconscious charging decisions impacted by race? Perhaps. But perhaps those unconcious decisions are already baked into the process because they evaluate the cases they get which are overwhelmingly crimes of poverty committed by people of color.
That’s the real problem in the system. I perfectly support the notion of making racially blind charging decisions, but I don’t expect it to change much except along the margins because racial bias is systemic, it’s not necessarily even implicit.
Thanks for reading.
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