Florida Sheriff’s Office Agrees To End ‘Predictive Policing’ Program That Targeted Students And Their Families

The Pasco County Sheriff’s Office in Florida thinks (or, at least, thought) it could make a dent in crime by engaging in “broken windows policing” by way of an Excel spreadsheet. I wish I was making this up but I’m absolutely not. The end result of this ad hoc “predictive policing” program was… well… predictable.

First the Sheriff’s Office generates lists of people it considers likely to break the law, based on arrest histories, unspecified intelligence and arbitrary decisions by police analysts.

Then it sends deputies to find and interrogate anyone whose name appears, often without probable cause, a search warrant or evidence of a specific crime.

They swarm homes in the middle of the night, waking families and embarrassing people in front of their neighbors. They write tickets for missing mailbox numbers and overgrown grass, saddling residents with court dates and fines. They come again and again, making arrests for any reason they can.

One former deputy described the directive like this: “Make their lives miserable until they move or sue.”

The next end result was equally predictable: the Pasco County Sheriff’s Office got sued. The Institute for Justice, representing multiple harassment victims, took the Sheriff to court over this so-called “predictive policing” program — one the Sheriff’s Office felt worked so well is should be expanded to “predict” which minors might be possible future criminal suspects. This one utilized an Excel spreadsheet overseen by [what fresh hell, etc.] “juvenile intelligence analysts.” Students were graded by deputies based on things they had done or things that had happened to them in order to determine exactly how much harassment officers should bring to bear against them and their families.

As was revealed earlier by another investigation, the Pasco County Sheriff’s other predictive policing program has led to months of harassment, with supposed “at-risk” residents being cited for un-mowed lawns, missing mailbox numbers, minors smoking on their property, and having chickens in their yard. When fines and fees aren’t paid, deputies start arresting people. Anyone flagged by the system can expect to be visited several times a month by deputies who apparently have way too much time on their hands.

The same harassment is in store for students the Pasco County Sheriff deems “at risk.” And it doesn’t take much to get on the list. According to the program’s documents, getting 1 “D” in a semester will flag a student as “at risk.” So will 3-4 absences in a quarter. Being a victim of a “personal crime” is also an at-risk factor.

Fortunately, this lo-fi version of “Minority Report” is now officially dead. As the Institute for Justice reports, it has secured a settlement from the Pasco County Sheriff’s Office — one that includes not only a payout, but a promise to terminate the program because of its contribution to years of civil rights violations.

In the settlement agreement, the Sheriff’s Office agreed that the program violated the Constitution in three separate ways: 

• First, the Sheriff admitted that the program violated the Fourth Amendment. Law enforcement has the “implied license” to knock on an innocent person’s door “just like any member of the public.” But, as the settlement agreement finds, “prolific offender checks were performed at the Plaintiffs’ residences that exceeded that implied license.”
• Second, the Sheriff admitted that the program violated the First Amendment, which protects people from being punished for their “intimate associations,” like with their family members. The prolific offender checks “directly and substantially interfered with the Plaintiffs’ right of intimate association.”
• Third, the Sheriff admitted that the program violated the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of due process because the prolific offender checks “interfered with Plaintiffs’ liberty interests.”

The settlement agreement includes a six-figure settlement for the plaintiffs, along with a promise that the Sheriff has ended the program and that it will never resume.

Unlike many settlements where the government keeps throwing other people’s money at plaintiffs until it can buy itself out of having to admit guilt, this settlement [PDF] contains statements from the sheriff’s office that explicitly agree the program violated constitutional rights. While it does contain some wiggle words stating the settlement should not be read as “acquiescence” to the allegations of the plaintiffs, the rest of it says otherwise: the main allegations have been admitted to and the sheriff has agreed to end the program.

Hopefully, this means it won’t be resurrected in the future if the sheriff’s office believes it has found a loophole it can exploit or simply an opportunity to restart its mass harassment program with a couple of boilerplate statements reminding officers to respect rights. But this is Florida, and local law enforcement is nearly as disrespectful of residents’ rights as the state legislature. My guess is that this story isn’t completely over quite yet.