Pasco's sheriff uses data to guess who will commit crime. Then deputies 'hunt down' and harass them.

[melman]

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 County residents, a Tampa Bay Times investigation has found.

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.”



https://projects.tampabay.com/projects/2020/investigations/police-pasco-sheriff-targeted/intelligence-led-policing/

[Pachamama]

1. Minority Report

[a kennedy]

5. Yes, yes, thanks.....couldn't remember the name of that movie.

[Initech]

12. Ha! I literally thought the same thing when I saw that headline.

You can't make this shit up!

[Initech]

13. Ha! I literally thought the same thing when I saw that headline.

You can't make this shit up!

[Phoenix61]

2. This is what happens when the "bad apple" ends up in charge. nt

[stillcool]

3. too much time on their hands...

must not be any real crime being committed, so to rationalize their jobs they make some up.

[asiliveandbreathe]

4. Pasco county sheriff and anyone who signed off on, or participate in this

directive need to be FIRED..brought up on whatever charges that may apply..

[Grokenstein]

6. More

Criminal justice experts said they were stunned by the agency’s practices. They compared the tactics to child abuse, mafia harassment and surveillance that could be expected under an authoritarian regime.

“Morally repugnant,” said Matthew Barge, an expert in police practices and civil rights who oversaw court-ordered agreements to address police misconduct in Cleveland and Baltimore.

“One of the worst manifestations of the intersection of junk science and bad policing — and an absolute absence of common sense and humanity — that I have seen in my career," said David Kennedy, a renowned criminologist at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, whose research on crime prevention is referenced in Pasco’s policies.

(snip)

It also involved “directed harassment,” former STAR team Cpl. Royce Rodgers said in an interview with the Times.

Rodgers, who also resigned from the Sheriff’s Office and is a plaintiff in the lawsuit with Starnes, said his captain ordered him to make the contacts aggressive enough that targets would want to move.

Rodgers and his team would show up at people’s homes just to make them uncomfortable, he said. They didn’t always log the contacts in the agency’s official records. He recalled parking five patrol cars outside one target’s home all night and visiting some as many as six times in a single day.

They would do the same to targets’ friends, relatives and other “associates,” he said.

“Those associates might have nothing to do with the offender,” Rodgers said. But as long as the analysts listed them in the system, “we’d harass them, too,” he said.

[lpbk2713]

7. Guilty until proven innocent.

It would hurt their feelings if anyone were to call them fascists.

[Iggo]

8. Pre-Crime.

Nice.

[dalton99a]

9. POS fascist appointed by Rick Scott:

Pasco County Sheriff Chris Nocco

Matthew Lott was put on the prolific offender list at 14. He was arrested at least six times in 2016 and 2017, mostly for breaking into unoccupied homes and cars. Deputies checked on him constantly, his mother recalled, sometimes interrupting family movie nights.

But by 2018, after several months at a residential program for at-risk kids outside of Orlando, Matthew started to turn his life around. He returned to Pasco, earned his GED, got a maintenance job at his church and stayed out of trouble, records show.

Still, deputies showed up at his door. They came one evening that September, when he was supposed to be resting after having his tonsils removed. They came again in October.

“He’s still labeled in our system as a prolific offender, which means he’s going to keep getting checked on,” a deputy told his mom, according to video of the encounter.

Three of Matthew’s close friends said he was afraid the department would find a reason to send him back to jail.

Six weeks after the October visit, Matthew’s body was found behind a vacant building on U.S. 19. His death was ruled a suicide by prescription drug overdose. Matthew had left a short note on his laptop, apologizing and thanking his family and friends.

[Hassin Bin Sober]

14. Maybe they should park a car outside Scott's house. Scott's company swindled hundreds of millions

And had to pay The US $2 billion in fines and restitution.

Scott plead The Fifth 75 times. That alone should earn him some citations for mailbox paint.

[Demovictory9]

10. Horrible!!!

[GulfCoast66]

11. Pasco County is 1 county west of me. The worst of Florida.

The east of the county is old, southern Florida. Farmers and ranchers. Evangelicals and conservatives Catholics. The west on the coast rich retires from up north. 90% white.

A majority of the country will approve of these tactics. I would expect him to run for higher office soon. And win.

The irony is it is kind of squeezed between the Orlando and Tampa metro areas. Both of which are rapidly turning more Democratic. Orlando is totally Democratic now. Tampa is heading that way.

Even my county, lake is rapidly changing. At least South lake county which is a bedroom community for Orlando. But it will be several cycles before we vote Democratic.

[Xolodno]

15. Data analytics and ethics.

It's never been truly addressed.

Just as there are privacy laws, analytics data used for what purpose needs to have some laws.

And a second point, if they are doing this, then they are over funded if they have that much time on their hands.