Algorithm Validation as a Policy Audit: Evidence from Race-blind Charging
California recently required all prosecutors in the state to conduct a "race-blind charging" decision by reviewing case documents in which selected race-related proxies have been redacted. We validate bc2, an open-source, LLM-based algorithm that we developed to automate this redaction and that was used to facilitate race-blind review in more than 119,000 real-world cases in 2025. We evaluate two distinct questions: whether bc2 faithfully implements the state's requirements and whether those requirements, even when faithfully implemented, advance the goal of race-blind decision-making. To do so, we draw on a corpus of nearly 5,000 real-world police reports that we assembled from jurisdict...
| Authors | Muskan Walia, Joe Nudell, Alex Chohlas-Wood |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CY |
| Published | 27 July 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 27 July 2026 |
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