Unsecured Data Leak Shows Predicitive Policing Is Just Tech-Washed, Old School Biased Policing

from the hey-that-data-isn't-accurate-says-AI-company-confirming-data's-accuracy dept

Don't kid yourselves, techbros. Predictive policing is regular policing, only with confirmation bias built in. The only question for citizens is whether or not they want to pay tech companies millions to give them the same racist policing they've been dealing with since policing began.

Gizmodo (working with The Markup) was able to access predictive policing data stored on an unsecured server. The data they obtained reinforces everything that's been reported about this form of "smarter" policing, confirming its utility as a law enforcement echo chamber that allows cops to harass more minorities because that's always what they've done in the past.

Between 2018 and 2021, more than one in 33 U.S. residents were potentially subject to police patrol decisions directed by crime-prediction software called PredPol.

The company that makes it sent more than 5.9 million of these crime predictions to law enforcement agencies across the country—from California to Florida, Texas to New Jersey—and we found those reports on an unsecured server.

Gizmodo and The Markup analyzed them and found persistent patterns.

Residents of neighborhoods where PredPol suggested few patrols tended to be Whiter and more middle- to upper-income. Many of these areas went years without a single crime prediction.

By contrast, neighborhoods the software targeted for increased patrols were more likely to be home to Blacks, Latinos, and families that would qualify for the federal free and reduced lunch program.

Targeted more? In some cases, that's an understatement. Predictive policing algorithms compound existing problems. If cops patrolled neighborhoods mainly populated by minorities frequently in the past due to biased pre-predictive policing habits, the introduction of that data into the system returns "predictions" that "predict" more crime to be committed in areas where officers have most often been located historically.

The end result is what you see summarized above: non-white neighborhoods receive the most police attention, resulting in more data to feed to the machine, which results in more outputs that say cops should do the same thing they've been doing for decades more often. Run this feedback loop through enough iterations and it results in the continued infliction of misery on certain members of the population.

These communities weren’t just targeted more—in some cases, they were targeted relentlessly. Crimes were predicted every day, sometimes multiple times a day, sometimes in multiple locations in the same neighborhood: thousands upon thousands of crime predictions over years.

That's the aggregate. This is the personal cost.

Take the 111-unit Buena Vista low-income housing complex in Elgin. Six times as many Black people live in the neighborhood where Buena Vista is located than the city average.

Police made 121 arrests at the complex between Jan. 1, 2018, and Oct. 15, 2020, according to records provided by the city, many for domestic abuse, several for outstanding warrants, and some for minor offenses, including a handful for trespassing by people excluded from the complex.

Those incidents, along with 911 calls, fed the algorithm, according to Schuessler, the Elgin Police Department’s deputy chief.

As a result, PredPol’s software predicted that burglaries, vehicle crimes, robberies, and violent crimes would occur there every day, sometimes multiple times a day—2,900 crime predictions over 29 months.

That's not policing. That's oppression. Both law enforcement and a percentage of the general public still believe cops are capable of preventing crime, even though that has never been a feature of American law enforcement. PredPol software leans into this delusion, building on bad assumptions fueled by biased data to claim that data-based policing can convert police omnipresence into crime reduction. The reality is far more dire: residents in over-policed areas are confronted, detained, or rung up on bullshit charges with alarming frequency. And this data gets fed back into the software to generate more of the same abuse.

None of this seems to matter to law enforcement agencies paying for this software paid for with federal and local tax dollars. Only one law enforcement official -- Elgin (IL) PD's deputy police chief -- called the software "bias by proxy." For everyone else, it was law enforcement business as usual.

That also goes for the company supplying the software. PredPol -- perhaps recognizing some people might assume the "Pred" stands for "Predatory" -- rebranded to the much more banal "Geolitica" earlier this year. The logo swap doesn't change the underlying algorithms, which have accurately predicted biased policing will result in more biased policing.

When confronted with the alarming findings following Gizmodo's and The Markup's examination of Geolitica predictive policing data, the company's first move was to claim (hilariously) that data found on unsecured servers couldn't be trusted.

PredPol, which renamed itself Geolitica in March, criticized our analysis as based on reports “found on the internet.”

Finding an unsecured server with data isn't the same thing as finding someone's speculative YouTube video about police patrol habits. What makes this bizarre accusation about the supposed inherent untrustworthiness of the data truly laughable is Geolitica's follow-up:

But the company did not dispute the authenticity of the prediction reports, which we provided, acknowledging that they “appeared to be generated by PredPol.”

Geolitica says everything is good. Its customers aren't so sure. Gizmodo received responses from 13 of 38 departments listed in the data and most sent back written statements that they no longer used PredPol. That includes the Los Angeles Police Department, an early adopter that sent PredPol packing after discovering it was more effective at generating lawsuits and complaints from residents than actually predicting or preventing crime.

This report -- which is extremely detailed and well-worth reading in full -- shows PredPol is just another boondoggle, albeit one that's able to take away people's freedoms along with their tax dollars. Until someone's willing to build a system that doesn't consider all cop data to be created equally, so-called "smart" policing is just putting a shiny tech sheen on old-school cop work that relies on harassing minorities to generate biased busywork for police officers.

Filed Under: biased policing, garbage in, garbage out, police tech, predictive policing, predpol
Companies: geolitica

New Report On Predictive Policing Shows How New Tech Is Giving Us Little More Than The Same Old Racism

from the recycling-racism dept

The National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers has just released an in-depth examination of predictive policing. Titled "Garbage In, Gospel Out," it details the many ways bad data based on biased policing has been allowed to generate even more bad data, allowing officers to engage in more biased policing but with the blessing of algorithms.

Given that law enforcement in this country can trace itself back to pre- and post-Civil War slave patrols, it's hardly surprising modern policing -- with all of its tech advances -- still disproportionately targets people of color. Operating under the assumption that past performance is an indicator of future results, predictive policing programs (and other so-called "intelligence-led" policing efforts) send officers to places they've already been several times, creating a self-perpetuating feedback loop that ensures the more often police head to a certain area, the more often police will head to a certain area.

As the report [PDF] points out, predictive policing is inadvertently accurately named. It doesn't predict where crime will happen. It only predicts how police will behave.

If crime data is to be understood as a “by-product of police activity,” then any predictive algorithms trained on this data would be predicting future policing, not future crime. Neighborhoods that have been disproportionately targeted by law enforcement in the past will be overrepresented in a crime dataset, and officers will become increasingly likely to patrol these same areas in order to “observe new criminal acts that confirm their prior beliefs regarding the distributions of criminal activity.” As the algorithm becomes increasingly confident that these locations are most likely to experience further criminal activity, the volume of arrests in these areas will continue to rise, fueling a never-ending cycle of distorted enforcement.

This loop bakes racism into the algorithm, "tech-washing" (as the NACDL puts it) the data to give it the veneer of objectivity. The more this happens, the worse it gets. Neighborhoods become "high crime" areas and police respond accordingly, having convinced themselves that looking busy is preferable to fighting crime. Millions of tax dollars are spent creating these destructive loops -- a perverse situation that asks taxpayers to fund their own misery.

Once an area is determined to be worthy of constant police presence, those living in these areas can expect to have their rights and liberties curtailed. And courts have sometimes agreed with these assessments, allowing officers to treat entire neighborhoods as inherently suspicious, allowing them to engage in searches and questioning of people who just happened to be in the "wrong place" at literally any time. And that's unlikely to improve until courts start asking tough questions about predictive policing programs.

Data-driven policing raises serious questions for a Fourth Amendment analysis. Prior to initiating an investigative stop, law enforcement typically must have either reasonable suspicion or probable cause. Does a person loitering on a corner in an identified “hotspot” translate to reasonable suspicion? What if that person was identified by an algorithm as a gang member or someone likely to be involved in drug dealing or gun violence? Can an algorithm alone ever satisfy the probable cause or reasonable suspicion requirement? The lack of transparency and clarity on the role that predictive algorithms play in supporting reasonable suspicion determinations could make it nearly impossible to surface a Fourth Amendment challenge while replicating historic patterns of over-policing.

Rights abridged before and after, all in the name of "smarter" policing which greatly resembles more analog methods like "broken windows policing" or numerous stop-and-frisk programs that allowed officers to stop and search nearly anyone for nearly no reason. The only difference is how much is being spent and how likely it is that cops and their oversight will believe it's "smarter" just because it's attached to thousands of dollars of computer equipment.

There's more to the report than this. This barely touches the surface. There are numerous problems with these systems, including the fact they're proprietary, which means the companies behind them won't allow their software to be examined by defendants and the programs themselves are rarely subject to oversight by either the departments using them or the city governments presiding over these police departments.

Data-driven policing is faulty because it relies on faulty data. It's as simple as that. Here are just a few examples of how "smarter" policing is actively harming the communities it's deployed in against.

In response to such advances in crime-mapping technologies, researchers have discovered that the underlying mathematical models are susceptible to “runaway feedback loops, where police are repeatedly sent back to the same neighborhoods regardless of the actual crime rate” as a byproduct of biased police data…

Bad data also infects other efforts by police departments, like potential sources of useful intel like gang databases, which have been allowed to become landfills for garbage inputs.

For example, CalGang, a database widely used in California, listed 42 infants under the age of 1 as active gang members. Moreover, because there is “no clear, consistent and transparent exit process” for those on the database, it can be assumed that a significant proportion of “gang” designees were added in their teens and preteens. The Chicago Police Department (CPD)’s database includes more than 7,700 people who were added to the database before they turned 18, including 52 children who were only 11 or 12 years old at the time of their inclusion. An investigation published by The Intercept identified hundreds of children between the ages of 13 and 16 listed in the New York Police Department (NYPD)’s gang database in 2018.

The programs have proven so useless in some cases that cities that have long relied on predictive policing programs are dumping them.

The SSL program was “dumped” by the CPD [Chicago PD] in 2020 after a report published by the City of Chicago’s Office of the Inspector General (OIG) concluded that the SSL had not been effective in reducing violence, and that “of the 398,684 individuals recorded in one version of the model, only 16.3 percent were confirmed to be members of gangs.” In her meeting with the Task Force, Jessica Saunders, formerly a researcher at the RAND Corporation, additionally noted that there was no evidence that any person-based predictive policing strategies like the SSL had proven “effective” by any metrics.

The biggest lie in all of this isn't how it's portrayed to outsiders. It's the lie law enforcement agencies tell themselves: that data-driven policing is better and smarter than the way they used to do things. But it's just the same things they've always done. The tech doesn't give them an edge. It just confirms their biases.

As legal scholar Elizabeth Joh noted in her conversation with the Task Force, the discussion surrounding big data policing programs often assumes that the police are the consumers, or the “end users,” of big data, when they themselves are generating much of the information upon which big data programs rely from the start. Prior to being fed into a predictive policing algorithm, crime data must first be “observed, noticed, acted upon, collected, categorized, and recorded” by the police. Therefore, “every action – or refusal to act – on the part of a police officer, and every similar decision made by a police department, is also a decision about how and whether to generate data."

Data-driven policing is pretty much indistinguishable from non-data-driven policing. The only difference is how much is being spent on useless tech and what police officers and supervisors are telling themselves to maintain the illusion that biased policing can actually increase public safety and reduce crime.

Filed Under: police, predictive policing, racisim
Companies: nacdl

DOJ Now Investigating Florida Sheriff's Office For Using A Federal Grant To Fund Its 'Predictive Policing' Harassment Programs

from the claw-it-back dept

The Pasco County (FL) Sheriff's Office believes in "intelligence-led policing." This is its formal slang for harassing residents until (in the office's own words) "they sue or move." The Sheriff's Office turns anyone with a criminal background into a suspect-for-life. Deputies visit residences and residents on the "intelligence-led" shit list multiple times a month, demanding answers to questions they have no business asking. When residents fail to comply, nuisance (in every sense of the word) citations are issued for things like uncut grass or missing mailbox numbers.

It doesn't really matter whether the Sheriff's Office believes its own PR bullshit. It is fully engaged in harassing as many residents as possible. That's why it's allowed its so-called predictive policing program to infiltrate local schools, subjecting minors (and their families) to the same harassment previously limited to adults with criminal records. Almost anything can trigger unwelcome interactions with the office's deputies, including slipping grades, missed school days, or simply being the victim of, or witness to domestic violence.

Local schools are apparently fine with this. They've been sharing student records with the Sheriff's Office. And the Sheriff's Office has been sharing this info with officers. Both of these actions appear to violate federal and local student privacy laws. Not that the Sheriff's Office cares. It says it has done nothing wrong -- only availed itself of records shared with it (unlawfully) by schools.

The exposure of these programs by the Tampa Bay Times has led to multiple investigations and accusations of lawbreaking. One of these investigations involves the federal government, which makes it clear it's not just the locals that find the Sheriff's Office's programs abhorrent. The Department of Education opened an investigation in April to determine whether the in-school "intelligence-led policing" violated federal student privacy laws.

There's a new federal investigation underway. The Department of Justice wants to know what the fuck is going on in Pasco County, Florida. (h/t WarOnPrivacy)

The U.S. Department of Justice is conducting an “intensive review” of the Pasco Sheriff’s Office’s latest intelligence program, federal officials said this week.

The Justice Department sent a letter to the Sheriff’s Office on Aug. 6 — two weeks after the Tampa Bay Times reported that the Sheriff’s Office had promised increased police scrutiny for people whose criminal histories included violent crimes and drug offenses.

The Justice Department’s letter raised concerns about the methodology used to identify targets, communications with the community and the “insufficient” coordination with relevant law enforcement agencies.

The DOJ's interest no doubt has something to do with the Tampa Bay Times' incredible reporting. But it also wants to know why it gave the Sheriff's Office $700,000 if it was just going to use it to violate the terms of the Bureau of Justice Assistance grant.

This is from the DOJ's letter [PDF] to the Pasco County Sheriff's Office:

Agencies that receive SPI funding are expected to engage members of their communities as allies in reducing violence, ensure transparency in their crime reduction approaches whenever feasible, and establish innovative and effective working relationships with citizens and community leaders to gain support for their proposed policing initiatives. Trust, and building trust, is at the core of SPI funding.

But:

PCSO recently circulated the attached letter to individuals regarding a PCSO-run program (the “PCSO program”), which claimed to be “in cooperation with the Department of Justice’s Strategies for Policing Innovation Initiative.” However, the letter does not adequately depict the dedicated training and technical resources under SPI provided by the Department, nor does it adequately describe the requirements for greater community engagement required for SPI’s success.

And:

We also have concerns regarding the methodology used to identify individuals for inclusion in the PCSO program; the name of the program; communications about the program; the lack of involvement and communication with the greater community about the program; and the insufficient coordination with relevant law enforcement stakeholder groups. These shortcomings have the unfortunate consequence of eroding trust in the community, rather than building trust. Given this, and given the goals of SPI, BJA will undertake an immediate assessment of the activities funded under this grant award.

Brace for some federal damnation. Also, brace for opening up the Pasco County coffers to… um… cough up the $700,000 misused by the Sheriff's Office to (and I will quote here) "erode trust in the community."

The Sheriff's Office has responded [PDF]. And it claims it is completely baffled that the DOJ would think its BS predictive policing/targeted harassment program would undermine trust in the community it's supposed to be serving. Instead, it says it followed the instructions given to it by the Trump DOJ.

The Pasco Sheriff's Office (PSO) is in receipt of your correspondence dated August 6, 2021 re- garding the Smart Policing Initiative grant awarded to PSO in 2018. After careful review of the letter, we are left confused as to the origins of the concerns and intentions expressed by the Bureau of Justice Assistance (BJA). Over the last two years, PSO has been working hand-in-hand with the subject matter experts (SMES)' assigned by BIA to implement this grant. In fulfilling the conditions of the grant, PSO actively collaborates with the BJA-assigned SMEs as well as the University of South Florida (USF) in research partnership and follows all guidance and directives they provide. The written feedback provided by these SMEs included phrases such as “excellent job!” and “the messaging was delivered well,” and referenced the “fantastic partnerships” PSO established with the SPI project. Yet for reasons unknown to PSO, your letter directly contradicts the guidance we have been provided over the last two years.

No doubt the current DOJ (headed by Merrick Garland) takes a different view of community-oriented policing than the DOJ led by Jeff Sessions and Bill Barr did. If there's any confusion, it's due to the DOJ reining in its focus on civil rights violations under Donald Trump and its reemergence post Trump as an agency that will at least engage in investigations of problematic law enforcement agencies, even if it's not that great at delivering sustainable results.

Too bad. Meet the new boss, not quite the same as the old boss. Flow my tears, the sheriff who didn't want to comprehend the new paradigm said:

We were excited to work with BJA on this innovative, research-driven initiative, and we are extremely disappointed by this abrupt change in direction.

That's weird. I thought law enforcement officers are trained experts on reacting to fast-moving situations. But maybe that only refers to the indiscriminate deployment of excessive and/or deadly force. Maybe the only ways cops can embrace change is with chokeholds and bullets.

Sure, it doesn't help that the DOJ sent contradictory messages to the Pasco County Sheriff's Office. But as Pasco County Sheriff Chris Nocco surely is aware (being that his position is an elected position), the rules can change when the regime changes. The previous administration may have felt the public was the problem and shows of force by armed government employees was the solution. But the current administration doesn't feel that way. And it has every right to ask why the Pasco County Sheriff's Office spent nearly a million dollars in federal money alienating the community and harassing their kids.

Filed Under: doe, doj, florida, pasco county, pasco county sheriff's office, predictive policing, privacy, schools, surveillance

Ten Seconds Of Doing Nothing Is Reasonably Suspicious, Says The Fifth Circuit Appeals Court

from the can't-make-crime-fighting-omelettes-without-breaking-a-few-Constitutional-eg dept

How much does it take to establish reasonable suspicion needed to subject a person to an at least temporary removal of most of their rights? Not much, says the Fifth Circuit Appeals Court, which appears willing to keep poking the SCOTUS bear with its mind-boggling interpretations of Constitutional rights and the power of law enforcement to bypass them.

This recent decision, highlighted by defense lawyer/"Constitutional cultist" Andrew Fleischman, says all cops need are a few seconds of observation and some vague assertions about criminal activity in the general area.

Here's the setup, as presented by the Fifth Circuit [PDF]:

Otha Ray Flowers, convicted of a federal gun violation, appeals the denial of his motion to suppress evidence as a violation of his Fourth Amendment rights. The questions on appeal are whether Flowers and Jeremy Mayo were “seized” when five or six patrol cars parked behind and around Mayo’s Cadillac with their patrol lights flashing, and if they were seized, whether Officer Stanton had reasonable suspicion to conduct a “Terry stop.”

Some cops were doing some cop stuff in the area. According to the facts on record, the officers were "looking for suspicious behavior," a supposedly "proactive" effort in an allegedly high-crime area that is meant to deter criminal acts by, apparently, rolling up en masse on anyone viewed as suspicious by these Direct Action Response Team (yes, that spells DART) officers.

Flowers and Mayo were sitting in the parking lot of a convenience store. The officers were in the area because their supervisor had directed them to patrol near there because of "recent violent crimes and burglaries." This sounds suspiciously like "predictive policing," which sends cops to where crimes have been committed under the assumption that lightning strikes twice/people are less white. The Jackson, Mississippi panopticon works, I guess. But only on the assumption that people living, working, or temporarily idling a vehicle in a high-crime area have fewer rights than those fortunate enough to be elsewhere.

So, what were these two "suspects" doing that raised enough suspicion a stop involving five police cars and six officers was warranted? Failing to do anything other than sit in a car for less time than it takes to read the previous two paragraphs:

As Officer Stanton was turning from Capitol Street onto Road of Remembrance, he saw a silver Cadillac parked in the south end of a small parking lot connected to an open convenience store. It was dark outside, but Officer Stanton observed that the vehicle was occupied by two men, one in the driver’s seat and one in the passenger’s seat. Officer Stanton observed the vehicle “for approximately 10 to 15 seconds” and noticed the occupants “didn’t appear to be exiting the vehicle, [and] didn’t appear to be patronizing the establishment.” Therefore, he decided to conduct what he characterized as a “field interview.”

Apparently, even non-movements can be furtive. The response to this momentarily-observed lack of activity was a literal swarm of police officers.

Officer Stanton testified that at this point, he and five to six other officers, all in separate patrol cars, converged upon the silver vehicle with their blue lights activated. The parking lot in front of the store was narrow, with very little space or room to maneuver. Officer Stanton later acknowledged that it would have been impossible for the silver vehicle to leave the parking lot because of the way the officers parked their cars around it.

Behold the majestic absurdity of the following assertion:

Officer Stanton got out of his patrol car and approached the silver vehicle, as did other officers. He testified that the men in the vehicle were still free to leave at this point in the encounter, but he did not communicate that to them.

Who amongst us with five or six police cars surrounding our car would feel "free to leave," whether or not that option was communicated to us by one of the six surrounding the car? No one. Not a goddamn person would feel this encounter was still voluntary.

At least the Fifth Circuit Appeals Court said it was a seizure under the Fourth Amendment. Pretending it was still consensual was a step too far for even this notoriously law enforcement-friendly circuit. But the very least a court should do when presented with this kind of assertion is to apprise officers that literally no one -- not even the officer making this sworn statement -- actually believes this kind of "interaction" is consensual.

The end result was the discovery of some marijuana, a gun, and an outstanding warrant. This led to felony charges. And the Fifth Circuit is fine with this outcome because, hey, don't sit in a car in a high crime area, I guess.

It bears repeating that apart from the presence of a number of police cars, the tenor of Officer Stanton’s encounter with Flowers was entirely benign until Stanton smelled marijuana. He conducted no physical frisk of Flowers’s person but simply approached the Cadillac to ask some questions. If this course of conduct is constitutionally impermissible, then it is difficult to see how any active policing can take place in communities endangered and impoverished by high crime rates.

That's the takeaway from this decision. Cops can wander over Constitutional lines as long as a court is willing to grant their "high crime area" assertions credibility. There's no legal definition of "high crime," so it can be whatever cops want it to be. And when they assert this in front of judges prone to grant every benefit of a doubt to fellow government employees, it will work nearly every time.

Flow our proxy tears, the court advocating on behalf of the policeman said:

Officers in such areas may well require safety in numbers, while the law-abiding citizens desperately need protection that will be denied if law enforcement officials believe that incriminating evidence will be suppressed or they will be sued for alleged violations of rights.

If the cops can't roll over rights to fight crime, how can they possibly fight crime? That's the question the Fifth Circuit is asking. And it should have an answer that says cops can't disregard rights just because they're patrolling areas where criminal activity is claimed to be "higher" than theoretical areas where it's apparently lower. But instead, the Appeals Court gives us this:

Under the circumstances of this case and viewing the facts in the light most favorable to the Government, assuming arguendo that these individuals were seized, there was reasonable suspicion to do so. We AFFIRM.

And that is that. The court has basically written a permission slip for stops based on nothing more than a few seconds of observation backed by officers' assertions that criminal activity has occurred nearby at some point in the past. Looking past the legalese, the Appeals Court is telling people their rights mean less if they happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, with the "wrong time" being a few seconds of non-movement while observed by officers trained to view literally anything as suspicious.

If there's any saving grace to this published decision, it's the dissent, which casts a whole lot of shade on the majority's conclusions while taking a shot at the overreacting cops.

As for the “dawdling” of approximately ten to fifteen seconds, the men could have been finishing a conversation, responding to text messages, watching with curiosity as a six-car police caravan passed, or engaging in other reasonable behavior that explains the delay. The facts in this case simply do not support an officer’s reasonable suspicion.

That should have been the majority's conclusion. Instead, it chose once again to elevate police officers over the policed, and ensured the poorest of the police can be treated the worst without officers feeling they might be held accountable in a court of law for the rights violations they've committed.

Filed Under: 4th amendment, 5th circuit, high crime areas, jeremy mayo, otha ray flowers, police, predictive policing, searches, suspicion

Cities Looking To Dump ShotSpotter Since It's Barely More Useful Than Doing Nothing At All

from the drop-it-like-it's-shot dept

Tech that supposedly detects gunshots has been deployed in multiple cities across the nation with the intent of providing faster response times to possible violence and to give investigators heads up where illegal activity may have occurred. The tech has some pretty serious problems, though.

For one, it cannot reliably detect gunshots.

A 2013 investigation of the effectiveness of ShotSpotter in Newark, New Jersey revealed that from 2010 to 2013, the system’s sensors alerted police 3,632 times, but only led to 17 actual arrests. According to the investigation, 75% of the gunshot alerts were false alarms.

The AI can "hear" the percussive noise and attempt to determine whether or not it's an actual gunshot. It could be a backfire or fireworks or some other noise distinguishably louder than the ambient noise at the detector's location. Far too often (and far more often than ShotSpotter claims), the guesses are wrong.

Out of Fall River’s 51 ShotSpotter activations in 2017, 21 have been false alarms, a 41 percent error rate. The sensors often report loud noises such as car backfires and fireworks as gunshots.

Dupere said there have been another 15 ShotSpotter activations this year that police later determined were unfounded because the responding officers found no evidence of gunfire or any witnesses to corroborate that they had seen or heard gunshots.

More disturbingly, the determinations made by the software can apparently be overridden if investigators truly want a shot to be spotted by tech like that offered by ShotSpotter. ShotSpotter personnel have altered AI judgment calls to fit police narratives. Worse, they've also moved detected shots from one location to another to better fit law enforcement's theory about who was involved in a shooting and where it happened.

ShotSpotter is an investigative tool, but it's a particularly malleable one. Investigators and officers seem pleased ShotSpotter personnel are willing to alter records to better suit their theories and narratives. But that's completely at odds with the ideal of evidence introduced in criminal cases, which is supposed to be free of bias and deliberate manipulation. When (criminal) history can be rewritten on the fly, the facts of the case are no longer factual.

These problems are exaggerated when law enforcement assumes any noise originating from ShotSpotter detectors is a gunshot and sends officers in to harass the locals until something turns up. Like almost every other tech advancement deployed by cops (especially "predictive policing," but there are others), the deployed tech tends to serve pre-existing biases held for decades by the law enforcement community: that minorities are inherently more "dangerous" than the white folks that tend to be overrepresented in law enforcement agencies.

Cities and police departments are loath to disclose the locations of their ShotSpotter sensors, but through public records requests Motherboard also obtained years of data from Kansas City, Missouri; Cleveland, Ohio; and Atlanta, Georgia showing where ShotSpotter sensors generated alerts—a proxy for the general location of the sensors.

In all four cities, the data shows that the sensors are also placed almost exclusively in majority Black and brown neighborhoods, based on population data from the U.S. Census.

So, there's the bigotry angle. This is on top of the evidence-faking issues. And then there are the limitation of the tech, which makes it an unwise investment for cities that actually want to do something about violent crime, rather than just let cops engage in biased policing.

The San Diego City Council was scheduled to vote July 27 on a $1.15 million renewal of its ShotSpotter contract, but city officials withdrew the item from the agenda after dozens of residents submitted public comments opposing the contract.

“ShotSpotter is a perfect example of the patronizing approach to public safety in Black and brown neighborhoods—this idea that we know what’s best for Black and brown community members,” Khalid Alexander, president of Pillars of the Community, told Motherboard. Pillars is an organization that opposes the over-policing of Black and brown residents, and is based in San Diego’s District 4—the only area of the city where ShotSpotter is located.

“I haven’t heard one person in District 4 ... come out and say that the ShotSpotter technology is something needed to keep us safe,” Alexander said.

Unsurprisingly, ShotSpotter says the opposite:

In a statement emailed to Motherboard, ShotSpotter claimed that local communities have told them the opposite, and that it would be "false and misleading" to describe the activists as representing the larger population. "As the communities who suffer most from gun violence, they recognize and appreciate ShotSpotter’s role helping police departments combat gun violence,” the company wrote.

While there's certainly some confirmation bias in play here, it's safe to say it's more than just a land of contrasts out there. But the only party that really has any money at stake is ShotSpotter, and self-preservation is a far stronger motivator than simply feeling underserved by law enforcement agencies that have decided to outsource serving and protecting to passive sensors and artificial intelligence. Taxpayer frustration may touch on fiscal issues, but since it's an aggregate fund, unhappy citizens tend to be less motivated by their bottom lines than companies with multi-million dollar contracts on the line.

And maybe $1.15 million/year seems like a drop in the bucket when it comes to police department budgets. Residents are sick of ShotSpotter and its ability to send officers expecting violence flooding into communities with guns akimbo. In Chicago, the contract now in danger of going unrenewed is $33 million, which is a very tangible hit to the bottom line of a company that early last year recorded record quarterly revenue of a little over $10 million.

Why keep paying for something that isn't doing anything much more than allowing alarmists to claim that violence is on the rise and the only cure is more cop violence? San Diego might not be paying much for its limited rollout of ShotSpotter, but even its small sample set is a complete disappointment.

A San Diego Police Department spokesperson told Voice of San Diego that during the four years ShotSpotter had been in use (as of September 2020) officers had made only two arrests responding to an alert and only one of those was directly linked to the alert.

Meanwhile, 72 of the 584 ShotSpotter alerts during that time period were determined to be unfounded, “a whopping 25 times higher than the 0.5 percent false positive rate put forth by the company,” the Voice of San Diego reported, based on data provided by the city’s police department.

Thirty-six times more false positives than useful investigative leads. $4.60 million (over four years at the going rate) should buy more help than that. It is only two arrests better than having nothing at all, which is so far below rounding error as to be laughable.

Even if the tech improves as time goes on, we still need to ask why we even need it. So far, all it's done is make ShotSpotter more money and justify biased policing efforts by law enforcement agencies willing to make use of any new development that allows them to keep doing the things they've always done. Taxpayers shouldn't be asked to fund programs that set cops up for failure. And they certainly shouldn't be expected to pay for the dubious privilege of being subjected to a system more capable of altering criminal evidence than making neighborhoods safer.

Filed Under: police, predictive policing, shotspotter, technology
Companies: shotspotter

Florida Sheriff's Office Now Notifying People It Will Be Inflicting Its Pre-Crime Program On Them

from the ensuring-accountability-for-everyone-but-the-Sheriff's-Office dept

The Pasco County (FL) Sheriff's Office has been swamped with negative press coverage centering on its predictive policing program. The Office claims it's not "predictive policing," but rather "intelligence-led policing." Whatever you call it, it sucks.

The Sheriff's Office may have some lofty goals that involve stopping crime before it starts, but the supposedly forward-looking policing program does little more than subject past offenders (along with friends, families, and acquaintances) to sustained harassment by law enforcement officers. What's supposed to keep crime down by directing resources to possible serious criminal activity has manifested as multiple visits from officers who do little more than try to coerce people into consenting to unlawful searches and write out nuisance citations for things like missing mailbox numbers or uncut grass.

The Sheriff's Office has since spun this off to include students at public schools, presumably to prep kids for a future of pointless harassment by law enforcement officers simply because they have the misfortune of living in Pasco County.

Thanks to some lawsuits and investigations, the Sheriff's Office is being a bit more proactive on the notification front. According to this ongoing investigation by the Tampa Bay Times, targets of the "intelligence" program are now being informed they've been blacklisted by the Sheriff's Office.

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

“We are pleased to inform you that you have been selected…” it says.

But the four-page letter from the Pasco Sheriff’s Office goes on to tell recipients they will be facing enhanced police scrutiny under the agency’s controversial intelligence program.

“You may wonder why you were enrolled in this program,” the letter continues. “You were selected as a result of an evaluation of your recent criminal behavior using an unbiased, evidence-based risk assessment designed to identify prolific offenders in our community. As a result of this designation, we will go to great efforts to encourage change in your life through enhanced support and increased accountability.”

It all sounds so positive. While there's really no evidence this is actually "evidence-based" or "unbiased," at least the Sheriff's Office is willing to "encourage change in your life." It sounds nice but "encouragement" probably just means "constant harassment" and "enhanced support" is probably a euphemism for suspicionless searches. "Increased accountability" may be part of this program, but it won't be applied to the Pasco County Sheriff's Office. Nope, there's a really good chance "increased accountability" means more fines, more citations, more arrests, and more jail time.

It's definitely an attempt at a lighter touch.

The new letter to so-called “prolific offenders” says its purpose is to communicate the agency’s “sincere desire” to help recipients “begin a new path.”

“We are committed to your success,” it says.

But is it sincere? All evidence points to "no." The stated goal of the Sheriff's "pre-crime" program was, in the department's own words, to make targets so miserable they either moved or sued the Sheriff's Office. Now that some targets have done both, the Office appears to be trying to rein things in just a bit, or at least pretend the program is not solely about vindictive, unjustified harassment of certain Pasco County residents.

After all the sweet things about wanting to help people live their best lives, the letter [PDF] gets down to business. If program targets can't meet the standards the Office doesn't bother detailing in this letter, they can expect even more law enforcement interaction in the future.

“Our desire to help you will not hinder us from holding you fully accountable for your choices and actions.”

It then says the Sheriff’s Office will share recipients’ names and criminal histories with local, state and federal law enforcement agencies to ensure “the highest level of accountability” for any future crimes they commit.

External pressure may have forced the Sheriff's Office to reconsider its "intelligence-led policing" program. But this letter shows it didn't get much further than sanding down the edges of some of its sharper words. The changes appear to be limited to giving residents heads up on their impending misery.

Filed Under: florida, harassment, minority report, pasco county, pre-crime, predictive policing

How Predictive Policing Got A Chicago Man Shot Twice

from the putting-someone-in-peril-in-the-name-of-public-safety dept

The Chicago Police Department is already seriously awful. Its reliance on software to decide who and where to police isn't making it any better. Predictive policing is only as good as the input data, and if the data is being input by police departments with long histories of biased policing, it's only going to generate algorithmic excuses for future biased policing.

Law enforcement officials call predictive policing a game changer. In reality, it appears to be little more than a way to ensure some people -- due to the area they live in or the people they know -- endure endless harassment by law enforcement officers. The ideal is cities being steadily scrubbed of crime by proactive officers. The reality is officers making multiple visits a month to certain homes to issue tickets for uncut grass.

And that's kind of a best case scenario, believe it or not. It can get far worse. The Chicago PD has been using predictive policing software for years and it hasn't given the department better cops or done anything to reduce the violent crime rate. But it has made people miserable. And it has made -- at least in one case examined in depth by Matt Stroud for The Verge -- one Chicago man the target of criminal violence.

Robert McDaniel -- who was one of the first city residents to make the PD's "heat list" back in 2013 -- isn't a violent criminal. In fact, his criminal history consists of nothing more than pot possession and illegal gambling. But he made the list because of where he lives (a Chicago neighborhood in which 10 percent of the city's murders have taken place) and who he knows. But even the cops who informed McDaniel of his presence on the "heat list" weren't sure what to do with this data.

[T]hey told McDaniel something he could hardly believe: an algorithm built by the Chicago Police Department predicted — based on his proximity to and relationships with known shooters and shooting casualties — that McDaniel would be involved in a shooting. That he would be a “party to violence,” but it wasn’t clear what side of the barrel he might be on. He could be the shooter, he might get shot. They didn’t know. But the data said he was at risk either way.

The constant, unwanted contact with Chicago PD officers ensured the latter happened. Criminals and other neighborhood residents assumed he was snitching. Officers frequently stopped by his house or hung around the bodega he worked at. A visit by filmmakers producing a documentary on predictive policing made things worse, raising even more questions about McDaniel and his relationship with the police department.

Those questions got McDaniel shot… twice.

A day or two later, while hanging out at a neighbor’s house a block away from his home, McDaniel says, he got a call from someone who, he says, “was supposed to’ve been a friend.” The friend said they were outside McDaniel’s house and wanted him to come outside and explain it again — what the story was, how he’d gotten on the heat list, why people from CPD had visited his home, why he was now being documented by filmmakers.

McDaniel agreed — but as he headed back to his house, a car pulled up. A man fired multiple shots from inside the car. One hit McDaniel in the knee, and his leg gave out.

Last summer, it happened again.

Near midnight on August 13th last year, he walked into an alleyway a few hundred feet from where shooters nearly killed him years before. It was quiet, a half-block from his home. Checking text messages on his phone, he looked up to see himself ambushed. Two shooters in black, an attempted hit. A surveillance video from that night shows darkened figures walking through an alley, bursts of gunfire. A figure — McDaniel — falls into a brick wall, then slides down to the ground.

To some officers, these shootings might be viewed as proof the "heat list" works. After all, McDaniel has twice been the victim of gun violence, just like the gypsy lady foretold just like the software said he would. Of course, that conclusion conveniently ignores the unending interactions with police officers that gave McDaniel the snitch reputation that got him shot.

Other officers seem a bit more cynical about the heat list's ability to actually pinpoint criminals or crime.

Mocking the opaqueness of the operation and its seeming ineffectiveness, Second City Cop, a local blog written by anonymous Chicago police officers, began referring to the heat list and its team as the “crystal ball unit.”

The "heat list" was finally abandoned in 2019, but not before doing serious, multiple-bullet-wound damage to McDaniel and an untold amount of harm to others before being shut down. Predictive policing soldiers on, though, but it appears the PD is no longer sending officers to harass people simply because they have an increased chance of being a victim of a violent crime.

And the program's end doesn't do anything for McDaniel. People in his neighborhood still apparently believe he's a snitch. The cops may stop by less frequently now that he's no longer interesting, but they kept at it long enough to turn this offshoot of predictive policing into a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Filed Under: chicago, chicago pd, police, predictive policing, robert mcdaniel

US Department Of Education Now Investigating Florida Sheriff's Student 'Pre-Crime' Program

from the Sheriff-showing-some-indicators-of-criminal-activity dept

The Pasco County (FL) Sheriff's Office decided to bring some of its predictive policing nonsense indoors. It also started looking for smaller targets. The program used to harass residents over things like uncut lawns and missing mailbox numbers was extended to schoolchildren, who were subjected to the same sort of spreadsheet bullshit. Low grades? Miss a few school days? Victim of domestic violence?

According to the Pasco County Sheriff "juvenile intelligence analysts," these were all risk factors that could signify future criminal behavior. The Sheriff claimed it wasn't trying to pre-crime children, but its own documentation said "analysts" should use the so-called "predictors" to "identify at-risk youth who are destined to a life of crime."

Not only is the program arguably morally wrong, it's also generally wrong. Predictive policing rarely works as intended since it relies on skewed data. Those inputs produce more skewed data, sending officers into the same areas they already believe criminal activity will occur and aims them at the same people they've already assumed are criminals. It's basically confirmation_bias.xls. But this program targets kids and uses data it's not clear the Sheriff's Office has any legal right to access.

That means the program may also be legally wrong. As in "illegal." Analysis of the program and the data-sharing agreements with schools by student privacy advocates resulted in the determination that this access to student data without parental consent violated FERPA (Family Education Rights and Privacy Act) -- a federal student privacy law passed in 1974.

This conclusion prompted Congressional reps to step in and request a federal investigation into Pasco County's pee-wee league pre-crime program. Four months after that request was made by Representative Robert C. Scott, the US Department of Education is moving forward with its review of the program.

The Tampa Bay Times reported in November that the school district shared information on student grades, discipline and attendance with the Sheriff’s Office, which used the data to compile a secret list of schoolchildren it believed could “fall into a life of crime.”

The federal education department is now looking into the arrangement, a spokesman said Friday.

The investigation follows calls for a review by U.S. Rep. Robert C. Scott, who leads the House Committee on Education and Labor. In a statement, Scott said he was “encouraged” that the education department had accepted his request. He called the Pasco program “disturbing.”

Now that the federal government is involved, the Pasco County Sheriff's Office appears to be hastily revising its program. While it still claims the program does not label kids as criminals (despite what its own documentation says), it has started to change what data it accesses and how it obtains that access.

The law enforcement agency said that deputies, who serve in the role as school resource officers, do have access to student grades. But the agency said for the first time that students were being added to any list for review only if they had committed a crime. Aside from its school resource deputies, the agency said that Sheriff’s Office employees can see whether a student has been flagged by the district’s early warning system — not whether they had been flagged for a specific reason, such as grades or attendance.

Starting to do the right thing after months of negative press and multiple investigations isn't really doing the right thing. It's just damage control. But the Sheriff's Office already spent months or years screwing up and that's going to still come to light even if it's not trying to stop violating federal regulations.

And the Sheriff's Office still seems pretty defensive for an agency that believes it's done nothing wrong. Rather than simply defer comment until the investigation concludes, the Sheriff's Office issued a multi-paragraph comment to the Tampa Bay Times that starts out by attacking the credibility of the paper whose initial report was based entirely on the Sheriff Office's own documents.

We have no additional comment beyond what was previously provided to the Tampa Bay Times. However, we’re proud of our partnership with Pasco County Schools and the work our members do to ensure safety to students, staff and families in our community. Additionally, I’m providing you with the below, which details much of the misinformation the Times has misconstrued through the course of their reporting and sets the record straight on facts vs slant.

As always, it is our sincere hope that the Times uses this opportunity to set the record straight on their own reporting and the previous fallacies they’ve published.

The statement does its own misleading by claiming the things the Sheriff's Office is doing now are the things it has always done, despite that clearly not being the case. It's trying to backdate its culpability with this statement and that may work for small parts of the court of public opinion, but it's not going to change the course of the ongoing investigation.

Even if one is inclined to take the Sheriff's Office at its word, the fact that it "only" determined 330 students to be "at risk" for future criminal behavior is still disturbing. While identifying at-risk students can be helpful and perhaps head off future criminal acts, the Office's predictive policing program mainly serves up constant harassment to anyone selected by the software as a potential criminal. Rather than deter criminal activity, the program makes it impossible for people to break free of the criminal justice deathcycle by subjecting them to meaningless citations, extra court appearances, and frequent visits from deputies who apparently have nothing better to do with their time.

This sort of harassment isn't going to help at-risk students. And it will definitely negatively impact those caring for them, making it all the more likely something already tenuous will break completely, resulting in further hardship for everyone involved. The Pasco Sheriff's Office had made it clear it's not there to help. It has openly stated the program is there to harass people into suing or moving. And it thinks it okay to direct this same attitude at kids.

Filed Under: department of education, doe, florida, pasco county, pre-crime, predictive policing

Florida Sheriff's Office Sued For Using 'Predictive Policing' Program To Harass Residents

from the better-at-creating-litigants-than-fighting-crime dept

The Pasco County (FL) Sheriff's Office is being sued over its targeted harassment program -- one it likes to call "predictive policing."

Predictive policing is pretty much garbage everywhere, since it relies on stats generated by biased policing to generate even more biased policing. In Pasco County, however, it's a plague willingly inflicted on residents by a sheriff (Chris Nocco) who has apparently described the ultimate goal of the program as "making [people] miserable until they move or sue."

Well, Pasco County's getting one of these outcomes, after years of hassling residents who happen to find themselves labelled as criminals or possible criminals by the Sheriff's faulty software. Under the guise of "fighting crime," Sheriff's deputies make multiple visits to residences deemed troublesome, ticketing them for unmowed lawns, missing mailbox numbers, or for "allowing" teens to smoke on their property.

This program has bled over into the area's schools, subjecting minors to the same scrutiny for failing to maintain high grades or steady attendance. In one case, a 15-year-old on probation was "visited" by deputies 21 times in six months. Since 2015, 12,500 "checks" have been performed as part of Office's predictive policing program.

The Institute for Justice is representing four plaintiffs, including Robert Jones -- a target of the program who did both things the Office wanted: moved and sued.

Robert Jones, a plaintiff in the lawsuit, knows the cruelties of Pasco’s program firsthand. In 2015, Robert’s teenage son had a number of run-ins with the law. That landed his son on Pasco’s “prolific offender” list. Shortly thereafter deputies started to conduct “prolific offender checks.” These warrantless “checks” involved repeated, unannounced visits to Robert’s home at all hours of the day. Robert grew tired of the harassment and stopped cooperating with police. That only made matters worse.

Code enforcement is a common tactic to compel cooperation. One deputy said they would “literally go out there and take a tape measure and measure the grass if somebody didn’t want to cooperate with us.” In Robert’s case, deputies cited him for tall grass, but failed to notify him of the citation. Then, when he failed to appear for a hearing that he was never told was happening, they arrested him for failure to appear.

All told, Robert was arrested five times by Pasco deputies. Although the bogus charges never stuck—they were all dropped—the harassment accomplished its goal: Robert ultimately moved his family out of Pasco County to escape the constant harassment from the Sheriff’s Office.

The lawsuit [PDF] says the misery inflicted by deputies isn't confined to "targeted" residents. If deputies feel they're not getting enough cooperation from their targets, they'll threaten friends and family members with arrests/citations until they get the level of cooperation they desire.

The lawsuit claims this program violates a number of constitutional rights, including the First and Fourth Amendments. The program makes it impossible for anyone's debt to society to ever be repaid. Plaintiff Dalenea Taylor served two years as a juvenile and hasn't committed any criminal acts since. Despite severing ties to her old criminal acquaintances, deputies have visited her residence as often as "every other day" for the past three years, demanding permission to search her house and threatening friends with criminal charges if they did not cooperate with their demands.

Another plaintiff was harassed by deputies multiple times a day because her son had ended up on the Sheriff's "target" list. This ultimately resulted in deputies manufacturing arrests to turn her into a convicted felon.

In order to avoid prosecution and the risk of additional time in jail, Tammy pled guilty in March 2018 to the offenses of misdemeanor battery, obstructing or resisting an officer without violence, and giving false information to law enforcement.

Subsequently, in September 2018, during another visit to Tammy’s property conducted as part of the Program, PCSO officials arrested Tammy for opening her front screen door into a PCSO deputy in the process of consenting to a search.

Because she was on probation stemming from the prior arrest, Tammy spent 76 days in jail. She accepted a plea deal to avoid additional jail time, and now she is a convicted felon.

There's a pattern of rights violations and intimidation the Sheriff's Office will now have to answer for. Here's another plaintiff's experience with deputies due to her son's (non-violent) criminal activity.

In one instance, PCSO deputies scaled a privacy fence to gain access to Dolly’s property. And in another, PCSO deputies assembled outside the residence and, using a bullhorn, demanded that Tyler—who was not there—come outside.

[...]

As retribution for Dolly’s perceived failure to cooperate with the Program, Dolly was cited for trivial code violations. Specifically, Dolly was fined $3,000 for missing house numbers, tall grass and having construction materials on her property while putting up a fence.

The pervasive harassment and intimidation of residents by the Sheriff's Office is so awful even long-standing supporters of law enforcement are demanding changes.

U.S. Rep. Matt Gaetz has called on Florida's governor to remove a sheriff who was sued this week by four residents claiming an intelligence program run by the top cop's agency violated their constitutional rights.

In a tweet on Thursday, Gaetz, a Republican congressman from the Florida Panhandle, said Gov. Ron DeSantis had the authority to remove Pasco County Sheriff Chris Nocco and should consider doing so.

“I don’t care that this is being done by a GOP Sheriff," Gaetz said in the tweet. “Its awful to harass citizens because you think they may commit crimes, hoping to make their lives miserable.'

And even if the program worked, it still wouldn't be an acceptable excuse for years of unwarranted harassment. But it doesn't. The stats don't back up the Office's claim the program is essential to reducing crime.

The agency has previously said it stands behind its intelligence program and credited it with a reduction in burglaries, larcenies and auto thefts over the last decade. The decline mirrors those in nearby police jurisdictions, according to the Times.

A decade of abusing the public and the public's trust and all the Pasco County Sheriff's Office has to show for it is a brand new lawsuit. Hopefully the judge will see this for what it is: a long-running intimidation campaign pretending to be "intelligence-led policing."

Filed Under: chris nocco, florida, pasco county, pasco county sheriff's office, predictive policing, robert jones

Palantir Presentations Show How The LAPD Is Able To Turn Tons Of Garbage Data Into Ineffective Policing

from the money-for-nothing dept

Palantir is raking in millions. It's your surveillance provider, whether you -- the valued customer target -- had any say in the matter or not. Data comes in from all over and Palantir helps law enforcement make sense of it. Haystacks are useless. "Drilling down" -- to use official Palantir parlance -- is everything. Whether it's ICE or your local PD, Palantir is turning data into arrests… or at least stops/frisks and low-level harassment.

Palantir gives law enforcement something roughly aligned with predictive policing. Predictive policing has given itself a bad name over the years by relying on dirty data supplied by cops who target minorities under the bigoted assumption that that's where the crime is. Palantir doesn't use that term but its analytics provide the same outcome: garbage results from garbage data.

And there's oh so much data. Everything cops own gets fed into the system: millions of license plate photos from ALPRs, every piece of detritus generated by police reports, gang databases that think residents are gang members because they happen to live in gang territory, etc. And it adds in everything else: state license plate databases, regional crime center reports, the bullshit crafted by DHS-led "fusion centers." Everything goes in and Palantir helps craft what comes out.

Documents obtained by BuzzFeed show how much crafting Palantir does and how much minute detail its software allows officers to fiddle with. It's not cheap, but agencies like the Los Angeles Police Department feel it's worth it.

Palantir is expensive, and police departments often struggle to afford it. Between 2015 and 2016, the LA Mayor’s Office of Public Safety got the money to pay for Palantir from the federal government — specifically, from the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s Urban Areas Security Initiative (UASI) Program, which gives cities technology to "prevent, protect against, mitigate, respond to, and recover from acts of terrorism."

It’s unclear if the LAPD always used federal UASI money to pay for Palantir, or if it only used federal money in those years. But purchase orders show that Palantir software upgrades and user licenses cost hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars.

Do law enforcement agencies get what they pay for? Well, that depends on who you ask. The LAPD thinks it's a sound investment. Critics say it's nothing more than the public paying their public servants to spy on them in granular detail. Whatever it is, it's profitable for Palantir and very, very popular within the LAPD.

Palantir is no small thing within the LAPD. Almost 5,000 people, more than half of all LAPD officers had accounts on Palantir, according to an “LAPD Palantir Usage Metrics” document. The same document says that in 2016, those officers ran 60,000 searches in support of more than 10,000 cases.

Starting with little more than an alias or a distinctive tattoo, LAPD officers can begin rebuilding a person's life as compiled by the Department's numerous data inputs. Searching by sex, race, and distinctive markings, officers running searches can access names, email addresses, warrants, mugshots, physical addresses, personal relationships, employers, and anything else that may get swept into the mix.

Here's a very broad overview of how it works:

For the LAPD, Palantir swallowed up the contents of several major databases that were previously spread across public safety agencies throughout Los Angeles and the state, including incident reports, arrests, citations, license plate reader data, field interviews, recovered vehicles, warrants, booking photos, and data from the California Law Enforcement Telecommunications System, and the county’s Community Health Services data. Palantir algorithmically organizes this data, determining possible links between the people within it (e.g., “Sally was interviewed by police in a report about Fred”) and makes it searchable.

But is all this data getting the job done? The LAPD has been using Palantir's software for more than a decade. The Department killed off its predictive policing software earlier this year, citing its cost. But it could have just as easily cited its inability to do much more than subject overly-harassed residents to more harassment by mistaking past crime results for future criminal activity.

What about Palantir? Its decade at the LAPD doesn't appear to have had much of an impact. Violent crime rates in 2019 are about the same as they were in 2009. While homicide and robbery have declined slightly, aggravated assault has increased. (So have the number of rapes reported, but that may have more to do with more rape victims coming forward than an increase in rapes.) The numbers for non-violent crime are better, with big reductions in burglary and vehicle thefts.

But the Palantir-enabled LASER (Los Angeles Strategic Extraction and Restoration) program doesn't appear to have done anything a system utilizing less always-on surveillance could have accomplished. Garbage data gave cops garbage to work with, resulting in a lot of attention being paid to people who weren't causing any problems.

Out of the 637 Chronic Offenders identified by the LAPD, 44% were never arrested for a violent or gun-related crime, despite LASER's attempt to target violent crime. And 10% of Chronic Offenders had zero contacts with police — meaning zero arrests and zero mentions in field interviews. Per LASER’s guidelines, 100% of Chronic Offenders should have already been arrested for a violent crime.

[...]

It also couldn't find evidence that LASER reduced crime. The report said that in 6 out of the 13 LASER Zones, violent crime rates were “the same as, or worse than, those for non-LASER Zones.”

LASER is now dead, thanks to budget issues, COVID-19, and an oversight report the LAPD couldn't credibly contradict. But LASER is still very much alive, doing business under a less memorable name. And it's still powered by Palantir. It's called "Data-Informed, Community-Focused Policing." It sounds friendly, but it's worse than its predecessor.

The new plan formally expands the surveillance that began under LASER. Under LASER, the LAPD said people who were arrested for violent or gun-related crimes could be surveilled. Now, people suspected of nonviolent property crimes can also be.

And for being cutting edge, it clings to some really old fashioned ideas. The presentation for the new LASER says crime can be prevented by "physical maintenance and general upkeep" of property. Broken windows policing is back. And it's got a shiny, high-tech sheen thanks to Palantir.

Filed Under: data, lapd, predictive policing
Companies: palantir