PREDICTIVE POLICING OR TARGETED HARASSMENT?

• Author: Ciaramella, C.J.
• Position: CIVIL LIBERTIES

RIO WOJTECKI, A 15-year-old Florida resident, hadn't been in trouble for nearly a year. But in late 2019, sheriff's deputies started showing up everywhere to "check up" on him.

Over four months, deputies from the Pasco County Sheriff's Office contacted Wojtecki or his family 21 times--at his house, at his gym, at his parents' work. When Wojtecki's older sisters refused to let deputies inside the house during one of their frequent late-night visits, a deputy shouted, "You're about to have some issues." He threatened to write the family a ticket for not having their address number appropriately posted on their mailbox.

Wojtecki was one of nearly 1,000 Pasco County residents who ended up on a list of "prolific offenders" created by the sheriff's predictive policing program. The scope of the program, launched in 2011, was first revealed by the Tampa Bay Times in a stunning investigation published this September.

Predictive policing, or "intelligence-led policing," is the use of algorithms and huge troves of data to analyze crime trends. Departments use predictive policing software to identify crime hot spots--but it can also be used, as in Pasco County, to create "risk scores" that supposedly identify individuals who are likely to be perpetrators or victims of crimes. While Pasco County Sheriff Chris Nocco touted the program as a futuristic tool to stop crime before it happens by keeping tabs on likely criminals, a former deputy interviewed by the Tampa Bay Times described the...