SANTA CLARA COUNTY, Calif. (KGO) — Santa Clara County is using artificial intelligence developed by Stanford University to redact thousands of racist property records from its systems.
Racial covenants were used in the early 1900s to require property owners to follow certain rules, such as who could and could not live there.
Although these agreements have not been enforced, they remain in writing to this day.
When Daniel Ho, a professor at Stanford Law School, was buying a home in Palo Alto, he couldn’t believe certain clauses in the paperwork.
“The regulations stated that “this land shall not be used or occupied by persons of African, Japanese, Chinese, or Mongolian descent except in the capacity of servants of white people.”” he said.
This is known as the racial code. It was a now unconstitutional agreement enacted by property owners in the early 1900s that buyers had to abide by.
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In 2021, the state of California required all 58 counties to aggressively review these records and remove racial covenants from property records.
But in Santa Clara County, things weren’t so simple.
“We have about 24 million documents, or 84 million pages,” says the Santa Clara assistant. Secretary Louis Chiaramonte said:
“Well, it would be almost impossible for a human being to have to go through all of that,” ABC7 News reporter Dustin Dorsey said.
“That’s right,” Chiaramonte answered.
Ho, who had personally felt the effects of the racial code, tapped a team from Stanford University’s Institute for Regulation, Evaluation, and Governance to assist the county.
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RegLab uses AI machine learning technology to remove the human element from this work.
This AI tool was designed to search documents from 1902 to 1980. Most of the racist codes were created during this period.
“This allowed us to sift through 5.2 million deed records and find racial codes in many languages,” Ho said. “And as a result, approximately 7,500 acts (with racial covenants) were committed.”
This saved years’ worth of work (approximately 86,000 hours in total).
Most importantly, we have made it possible for you to remove these harmful terms from your records.
“I think there were probably a lot of reasons why they had it at the time, and all of those reasons baffle my mind,” Chiaramonte said. “In the end, we were fixing something that was wrong in the first place.”
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