San Francisco will expel thousands of marijuana convictions: NPR

San Francisco officials plan to cancel more than 9,000 marijuana convictions since 1975, the city 's top law enforcement official said on Monday.

This is the culmination of a review of convictions handed down a year after California voters legalized marijuana for recreation across the state in 2016. Several cities in California are tackling the task of delete records, but San Francisco is the first to finish his job. San Francisco Chronicle reported.

"It was morally the right thing to do," said George Gascón, District Attorney for San Francisco, at the Los Angeles Times. "If you have a crime conviction, you are automatically excluded from so many ways to participate in your community."

Mr. Gascón said his office would eliminate 9,362 crime and crime cases. This includes 1230 that his office had already erased. Before the city began digging through the archives to find people eligible to be released, only 23 people had asked the city to do something to address their beliefs, NPR reported last year. This is because the process was tedious, said Gascón to Ari Shapiro of NPR.

"You have to hire a lawyer.You have to make a petition to the court.You have to come for a hearing," Gascón said. "It's a very expensive and very tedious process, and the reality is that the majority of people who have been punished and who have suffered from this marijuana war, the fight against drugs at the national level, were people who can not afford to pay a lawyer. "

Gascón said marijuana had already been condemned, which sometimes made it difficult to obtain loans and public aid. The proactive approach of the city was to help people who "need help the most" but who "can not afford it or do not know how to do it", he declared.

Gascón's office also noted racial disparities in marijuana arrests, reported NPR. For example, in 2010 and 2011, African-Americans accounted for only 6% of the city's population, but accounted for about half of the arrests related to marijuana. Gascón said San Francisco "is taking the lead in repairing the damage caused by this country's disastrous and disastrous drug war to our country and the communities of color in particular."

After hand-reading the files and spotting about 1,200 eligible cases, San Francisco officials partnered with Code For America, a nonprofit organization that helps governments streamline their work by using technology to Identify new cases quickly. The cases will now be sent to court for treatment, Gascón said.

Code for America hopes to have eliminated a quarter of a million California convictions by the end of the year, the L.A. Times reported. The technology could be useful for localities to comply with a state law passed at the end of last year that aims to eliminate all marijuana-related crimes by July 2020.

Everyone is not happy. John Lovell, Legislative Counsel for the California Narcotic Officers Association, told the Time: "Simply embarking on a general radiation of 9,300 without considering any of the surrounding factors in any of these cases seems to us cavalier irresponsibility. "