Florida Sheriff Grady Judd Decides He’s Capable Of Running An AI Crime Thingy

Sheriffs answer to no one but voters. Consequently, they often answer to no one.

Voters tend to gravitate towards names they recognize. Sheriffs count on this form of “loyalty” to ensure years or decades at the helm of a county law enforcement agency. And this loyalty continues to pay off even when sheriffs are less than desirable.

They also tend to view the position as something out of the Old West. They make the rules and everyone just needs to abide by them. Others view the office as an ideological platform. That’s how we end up with people like Joe Arpaio, who basically ran his office for the clicks by dressing inmates in pink and jacking up non-whites on the regular in hopes of scoring big with the anti-immigration crowd.

Then there’s Sheriff Grady Judd, who runs the Polk County, Florida sheriff’s office. Judd is a grandstander. He’s never met a press conference he’s not willing to hold forth at. He’s spent years pretending he’s fighting the war against sex trafficking by backing terrible laws, sending sex workers (the apparent victims of sex trafficking) to jail, and engaging in a number of questionable child sexual abuse investigations. On top of that, he relishes dragging the accused through the mud and the more sordid the accusations, the better. On top of that, he’ll seize any property he can, which means he takes cars from men purchasing sex from (of completely legal age) sex workers.

He has zero interest in ensuring he’s running a tight ship. His deputies get arrested for criminal acts fairly regularly. During a hurricane, he sent deputies to city shelters to check IDs for the sole purpose of bumping up his arrest stats. He once threatened to jail Apple CEO Tim Cook because iPhones are encrypted by default.

Now, he’s on to the next thing. The man who obviously prefers running a mic to running a legitimate law enforcement agency has somehow convinced the future of America (i.e., college kids) to hook him up with this whole AI thing in hopes of catching up with the 21st century.

Polk County Sheriff’s Office is teaming up with Florida Polytechnic University in an effort to use the latest technological trend to fight crime.

Polk Sheriff Grady Judd announced the launch of the Sheriff’s Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, or SAIL. The Sheriff’s Office has started assembling staff and resources for a new investigative unit aimed at learning the latest technologies and artificial intelligence to keep people safe.

That’s just the start of The Ledger’s deeply credulous reporting on Sheriff Judd’s latest whatever-the-fuck this is.

It’s already obvious Judd can’t run a competent law enforcement agency. If there’s any good actually being done, it’s been buried by years of Judd’s self-congratulatory press releases and press conferences. Should he be trusted to start throwing AI at the crime problem he feels warrants the addition of tech he clearly doesn’t understand? Of course not. But being rational isn’t a prerequisite for law enforcement officials. In fact, the opposite is much more useful.

And that’s why we’re blessed with this “explanation” by Sheriff Judd:

“AI is the new uncharted universe that we must sail into and chart safe navigation for all of our community,” Judd said. “We will protect you from the evils of AI.”

lol. lmao, even.

Judd can’t protect his residents from real crime because he’s too busy chasing imaginary crime. The day-to-day work goes undone while his deputies dress up like 13-year-old girls (not literally, of course) to satisfy their fantasies of appearing in an episode of “To Catch A Predator.” Whatever floats their kink, I guess. But the real problem is Judd thinks play-acting on the internet gives him the right to engage in extra-territorial arrests.

And, of course, Judd’s kink factors into the sudden and very unwelcome addition of AI to the Polk County Sheriff’s Office. Judd believes adding AI to the day-to-day investigative work will “prevent crimes” because… [reads and re-reads Judd’s statements] “his office is already seeing instances of AI-generated child pornography.”

wait what?

Judd clearly believes his AI will be smarter than the AI used to create faux CSAM. But not for the same reasons.

The sheriff said it will be necessary to have the intelligence to disprove future creations, where a suspect or individual could potentially create a video of themselves to be used for an alibi.

Deputy J.H. Christ on a bicycle… this is insane. Judd seems to think he can wage an AI-on-AI battle and come out the winner, rather than just the subject of multiple civil rights lawsuits. He has zero interest in protecting the people who might be exploited or abused thanks to AI-enabled CSAM creations. Instead, he thinks his computer brain thing will help him poke holes in alibis by “disproving” defendants’ alibis.

This is super weird and super stupid. I’ve covered a lot of CSAM cases over the past decade-plus here at Techdirt and the number of times a defendant has submitted video recorded evidence of their whereabouts has yet to surpass zero.

There’s plenty more stupid in this article. And it’s hard to determine exactly where the nadir lies. Is it Sheriff Judd claiming the computers the Sheriff’s Office currently has are capable of handling processor-heavy AI work? Is it when he pretends there will be almost no cost to taxpayers because a publicly-funded college is handling all the work?

Maybe it’s this, where Judd ignores everything we already know about AI and other crime-fighting tech:

When asked about a concern for bias in AI programming, Judd said the AI is “not capable of bias.” Avent said the AI programs learn the algorithms and patterns they are taught, and it’s a matter of making sure the important data is input while discriminating factors are not.

Holy hell. Folks, if you reside in this county, the time to vote this chucklefuck out of office was years ago. Don’t let the next opportunity pass you by. This man is a danger to the people he’s supposed to be serving. And he’s never going to get any better. This guy thinks verbally stroking himself off in interviews and press conferences is the same thing as providing competent law enforcement leadership. But he’s just a punchline who happens to wear a badge. The problem is that no one who’s been subjected to his particular brand of law enforcement is laughing.