Incident 195: Predictive Policing Program by Florida Sheriff’s Office Allegedly Violated Residents’ Rights and Targeted Children of Vulnerable Groups

Description: The Intelligence-Led Policing model rolled out by the Pasco County Sheriff’s Office was allegedly developed based on flawed science and biased data that also contained sensitive information and irrelevant attributes about students, which critics said to be discriminatory.

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Alleged: unknown developed an AI system deployed by Pasco Sheriff's Office, which harmed Pasco residents , Pasco Black students and Pasco students with disabilities.

Incident Stats

Incident ID
195
Report Count
12
Incident Date
2015-09-01
Editors
Sean McGregor, Khoa Lam
Targeted
projects.tampabay.com · 2020

Pasco County Sheriff Chris Nocco took office in 2011 with a bold plan: to create a cutting-edge intelligence program that could stop crime before it happened.

What he actually built was a system to continuously monitor and harass Pasco Coun…

How a Florida Sheriff harasses families: Watch the body-cam video
projects.tampabay.com · 2020

Over the past five years, nearly 1,000 Pasco County residents have been swept up in the Pasco Sheriff’s Office’s data-driven policing program. The program aims to use analytics to identify people who the department thinks are most likely to…

Pasco Sheriff's Office Response
facebook.com · 2020

We are aware of a recent report by a media outlet in the Tampa Bay area that attempts to paint our Intelligence-Led Policing philosophy in a negative light.

While the media outlet was provided over 30 pages of factual information to disprov…

Joe Henderson: Do Pasco Sheriff’s Office surveillance tactics go over the line?
floridapolitics.com · 2020

The county's Intelligence Led Policing sounds like an Orwellian nightmare.

You live in Pasco County and have one or two run-ins with the Sheriff’s Office on your record. Maybe it wasn’t a major crime, but that doesn’t matter. It’s late, and…

Pasco Sheriff’s Office pushes back against allegations of harassment, targeting
floridapolitics.com · 2020

Office says it's using data, not reading tea leaves.

The Pasco County Sheriff’s Office is pushing back against a recent Tampa Bay Times report that casts its “Intelligence-Led Policing” model as a bludgeon used to harass residents.

The Time…

Pasco’s sheriff uses grades and abuse histories to label schoolchildren potential criminals
projects.tampabay.com · 2020

The Pasco Sheriff’s Office keeps a secret list of kids it thinks could “fall into a life of crime” based on factors like whether they’ve been abused or gotten a D or an F in school, according to the agency's internal intelligence manual.

Th…

The man behind the machine
projects.tampabay.com · 2020

Pasco Sheriff Chris Nocco was once asked under oath how he had landed two high-level posts in state government.

“It was the connections that I had made,” he said bluntly.

“I mean, you didn't have to like go and interview along with a hundre…

Congressman urges probe of Pasco school data program
tampabay.com · 2021

The school district shares student data with the Sheriff’s Office, which uses it to identify potential future criminals.

Denouncing the program as promoting “racial bias” and further feeding the “school-to-prison pipeline,” a U.S. congressm…

Pasco Sheriff’s Office letter targets residents for ‘increased accountability’
tampabay.com · 2021

Critics of the agency’s intelligence programs called the letter ‘patronizing’ and ‘offensive,’ and raised continued concerns about civil rights

It starts like an offer of admission from a prestigious university.

“We are pleased to inform yo…

Lawsuit: Pasco intelligence program violated citizens’ rights
tampabay.com · 2021

A national public interest firm is representing the plaintiffs, who allege their First, Fourth and Fourteenth Amendment rights were infringed upon.

Four Pasco County residents are suing Sheriff Chris Nocco in federal court, alleging his int…

Pasco County’s Sheriff Must End Its Targeted Child Harassment Program
eff.org · 2021

The group asked the Department of Education to look at children of color, racial disparities in its federal investigation.

In September 2020, the Tampa Bay Times revealed a destructive “data-driven” policing program run by the Pasco County,…

Predictive policing strategies for children face pushback
nbcnews.com · 2021

Five months after Robert Jones, a 44-year-old aerospace process auditor, moved to what he described as the “really nice” neighborhood of Gulf Harbors in Pasco County, Florida, with his wife and four kids, “seven or eight” police cars showed…

Variants

A "variant" is an incident that shares the same causative factors, produces similar harms, and involves the same intelligent systems as a known AI incident. Rather than index variants as entirely separate incidents, we list variations of incidents under the first similar incident submitted to the database. Unlike other submission types to the incident database, variants are not required to have reporting in evidence external to the Incident Database. Learn more from the research paper.