BBC News

April 29, 2019

“I formed the opinion that this is really our responsibility,” said George Gascon, San Francisco’s district attorney.

Though almost 10,000 people in the city were predicted to be eligible for expungement, just 23 had come forward.

So in January 2018, Mr Gascon pledged to proactively review past marijuana cases - but there was a snag.

“When we started to do this by hand, we recognised very rapidly that this was going to take a long time.”

He enlisted Code For America, a non-profit organisation that works on creating Silicon Valley-esque solutions to problems within the many antiquated systems powering the US government.

The group had made Clear My Record, a tool that can analyse text in court files, using character recognition to decipher scanned documents.

It discards any record involving a violent crime, as such records do not qualify. For those that remain, the tool automatically fills out the necessary paperwork. In other words, the algorithm replaced the process being done manually at the expungement clinics.

Working with San Francisco’s raw data, Code For America was able to identify 8,132 eligible criminal records in a matter of minutes - in addition to the 1,230 found manually already. They dated as far back as 1975, the year in which the city started digitising its files.

And so it was, on 3 April, that San Francisco judge Samuel K Feng signed them all off - reopening life opportunities for thousands of people.

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-48072164