7 ms·

Pasco County’s Sheriff Must End Its Targeted Child Harassment Program

139 points by glitcher 6y ago

intpx 6y ago
How is this not a blatant violation of FERPA?
- CameronNemo 6y ago
  That is what I was thinking too. Don't sue the police. They will get any data they can get their hands on. Sue the school system that is supposed to be helping these children.
  - colpabar 6y ago
    >Don't sue the police >Sue the school system No. The article states that the school already lost grant funding because an organization didn't like what they were doing. I'd also be willing to bet the school is doing this due to lack of funding to begin with. Taking even more of their funding away would not help anything.
    - jawns 6y ago
      I think you can simultaneously support schools being better funded through legitimate avenues while rejecting the notion that underfunded schools should be able to sell students' private information to make money. This is not the only way the school can obtain adequate funding.
      - colpabar 6y ago
        I should have been more clear in my comment, but I am not saying I think it's ok that the school did this. I was suggesting that they could have done it in a desperate attempt for funding. But my main point is that you shouldn't sue schools, because you're just taking (your own) money away from students.
        jawns 6y ago
        > my main point is that you shouldn't sue schools, because you're just taking (your own) money away from students I respectfully disagree. The ability to sue public institutions -- schools, police departments, cities, etc. -- when they do wrong is key to accountability. It is never the preferred way, but sometimes it's a legitimate last resort. I also would not characterize it as taking your own money away from students. If a man was going to buy his daughter an expensive birthday present, but he drives drunk and crashes into my house, I might sue him, and he might have to give me the money he was planning to use to buy the present. But have I deprived the girl of her present, or has he? In the same way, it is the public institutions, and their leaders, who are at fault if they conduct themselves in a way that leads to legal liabilities, not the victims who sue. The students who are deprived of resources as a result of those legal liabilities should blame the school administration, not the victims.
- Someone1234 6y ago
  I just took at look at the law itself[0], and at least my non-lawyer reading of it doesn't seem to permit this type of broad un-targeted sharing. They can get records for specific investigations or safety incidents, but there's nothing in it that allows law enforcement a dragnet. So I don't understand how the school system is giving the police direct access to a student's grades? Seems unlawful. https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/20/1232g https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/20/1232g
- mutagen 6y ago
  It is a massive FERPA violation, according to the the following from a student privacy organization: https://studentprivacycompass.org/pasco/ https://studentprivacycompass.org/pasco/
belval 6y ago
> The ILP manual explains the program’s purpose is to identify youth “destined to a life of crime.” This is absurd. No one is destined to a life of crime. Poor wording aside, the idea behind the program itself would make sense if it was handled by child protection services and helped them identify youth with in a difficult situation that might benefit from being reoriented to a different path. I don't like seeing the police involved in those things, if anything we run the risk of antagonizing these kids and pushing them further down.
- biomcgary 6y ago
  One of my neighbors is a police officer and she is appalled by the behavior and decision making of child protection services. She described multiple occasions where she was required by law to accompany someone from CPS to take away a child in circumstances that were unwarranted and only happened because the family was too poor to fight a legal battle. The movie Evelyn (based on a true story) illustrates that this is a perennial problem.
  - belval 6y ago
    Yeah, I don't live in the US but our child service is pretty bad as well. My point was more that whoever handles this should not have connections to law enforcement as it could ultimately widen the divide between the police and the communities.
  - jawns 6y ago
    I think there's a lot of room for improvement for both law enforcement and CPS, but I agree with the comment you responded to. This seems more like it should be a social services intervention rather than a quasi-criminal investigation.
  - throwaway0a5e 6y ago
    >occasions where she was required by law to accompany someone from CPS Transit police, campus police, environmental police, all these law enforcement agencies exist because the parents organizations so routinely need the threat of state violence to back them up in situations where they are doing the wrong thing or it is just not plain warranted that they cannot rely on whatever the existing police are to respond to their calls. (Likewise at the federal level, the ATF and ICE exist because the FBI didn't consider that stuff a serious problem but politicians did.) They need their-own bespoke police force to handle the calls that are so illegitimate that they would get blown off by any PD that has its own reputation and efficient resource allocation to worry about. If you need to go somewhere (like getting your stuff from an ex) where you have good reason to fear physical harm the police will generally go with you. It might take awhile but they usually will, eventually (extreme outliers like Detroit notwithstanding). The fact that CPS needs to pull legislative strings to get the cops to show up tells you a lot about how the cops regard their operations. If the cops felt they were helping remove children from bad situations with any semblance of regularity they would love to field those calls.
threatofrain 6y ago
> 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.” > In just five years, Nocco’s signature program has ensnared almost 1,000 people.
readflaggedcomm 6y ago
Officers tailing probationed bike thieves fight not crime but budget cuts.
bookmarkable 6y ago
Pasco, just north of Tampa Bay, was an armpit for the last 50 years and now is a highly desirable area with many enclaves of new homes in the former pasture land. This sort of automated targeting is gross, but unsurprising, especially in a Deep South, backwoods county trying to clean up its image with newer, wealthier residents.
- istjohn 6y ago
  That sounds about right. In another comment, I cited a story about how we closed public pools en masse when they were becoming integrated[1]. People would rather have no public goods at all than share them with people they look down on. 1. https://www.marketplace.org/2021/02/15/public-pools-used-to-be-everywhere-in-america-then-racism-shut-them-down/ https://www.marketplace.org/2021/02/15/public-pools-used-to-...
  - latencyloser 6y ago
    Give me a break. I spent most of my life in this county and my family's been there for two generations prior. The "everything is racist" argument so poorly applies to the issues of these communities it's absolutely absurd. Come back when you find a different hammer.
    - Loughla 6y ago
      That's very hand-wavy and dismissive. Could you please elaborate on your beliefs?
      - latencyloser 6y ago
        The comment I was replying to cites an article about public pools and racist behaviors from 60+ years ago in entirely different communities that borders on a non-sequitur to these issues of community policing and does so as a commentary to the suggestion that these areas are "cleaning up their Deep south, backwoods" image by behaving this way, senselessly pushing the idea that racism is the cause of this. Talk about hand-wavy.
jeffbee 6y ago
Much of this just sounds like solid police work. If some kid steals a bicycle, the cops should hound their parents.
- Jtsummers 6y ago
  > After one 15-year-old was arrested for stealing bicycles out of a garage, the algorithm continuously dispatched police to harass him and his family. Over the span of five months, police went to his home 21 times. They also showed up at his gym and his parent’s place of work. Context from the article (I haven't dug into the sources), but if the kid was already charged (and after 5-months presumably sentenced) then this is way beyond what should be expected. And showing up at the parent's place of work could result in them losing their job which would be a net-negative for the family and the kid in question. It creates a downward spiral from deliberate police harassment. Which fits with the police's stated goal: > As one former deputy described the program to reporters, the objective was to “make their lives miserable until they move or sue.”
  - jeffbee 6y ago
    We don't have enough context to evaluate these statements, and the EFF has a long history of misleading and exaggerated claims. It would be appropriate for the police to visit the parent's places of work if they suspect that the parent's claims about what they do in the daytime are lies. It is absolutely proper for the police to try to figure out how a family went so far off the rails that their teenage child is a burglar. Also I find the idea that the perpetrator's family may face "net-negative" consequences to lack empathy with the victim. Their family may have faced net-negative consequences from the absence of the bicycle. There's an entire famous film about this!
    - Jtsummers 6y ago
      Ah yes. A kid steals a bike, so lets try to deprive the family of livelihood and further the downward economic spiral that often leads to more crime. Good plan there, keeps the police in business.
upofadown 6y ago
The root issue seems to be that this particular police force is allowed to harass people for no good reason related to past or present crime. The goofy reasons they use to justify this behaviour are irrelevant.
- throwaway0a5e 6y ago
  The reason this police force is allowed and has the capacity to do this is because this is a gentrifying suburb of Tampa. Gentrifying suburbs have no shortage of people seeking to force conformism on everyone else, money available for boondoggle policing and poors (i.e. a large chunk of existing residents) who a subset of the new residents think need to be controlled for their own good.
madamelic 6y ago
My favorite part is the diagram where the police consider "hanging around in public" as a bad thing. I am not a crazy conspiracy theorist but seems like they want the streets and malls empty of people, everyone locked away in their jai-- I mean homes.
- istjohn 6y ago
  For real. The US vastly underinvests in public goods. Everyone would be better off if we had attractive and free and plentiful public pools, recreation centers, play grounds, and transportation. Instead we neglect these, so everyone wants a big backyard with a pool and expensive exercise equipment in the basement and two cars in the garage. It's massively inefficient. Why did we go down this path? Part of the answer is racism. See https://www.marketplace.org/2021/02/15/public-pools-used-to-be-everywhere-in-america-then-racism-shut-them-down/ https://www.marketplace.org/2021/02/15/public-pools-used-to-...
  - tenebrisalietum 6y ago
    Public spaces are not places I like to be these days because: - someone's always playing music too loud, either from their car or their phone; - there seems to always be someone who is unwilling to control their children; - people get into fights, sometimes these escalate into serious safety issues. - someone is always trying to sell something or have unsolicited conversations about their religion; - recently in some places mentally ill people are doing unsafe things, such as drugs, etc. - people generally move around in fixed cliques and don't really interact beyond them - people are not socially conducive in this setting anyway. I'll say the public itself has decayed, likely due to economic factors, but no one is willing to fix that. So what's the point? If we're not going to fix the underlying social issues, I'd rather have multiple competing private spaces where someone can at least try to gateway out bad actors and there is some sort of incentive to enforce at least a minimum of behavior expectations for people within.
    - BoorishBears 6y ago
      I don't see a single thing here that's a new problem. The loud boombox is an icon of the 90s, kids used to run around outside more, not less, people are less religious than ever... Sounds to me like we just have a new class of people who want an oasis from the untouchables, which is fine But we shouldn't let that stop us from investing in public spaces.
anonAndOn 6y ago
You know what else fights juvenile crime? After school activities. I imagine you could save a lot of taxpayer money and fight crime if you just kept the HS gym open until 10pm.
- api 6y ago
  That's a simple solution. We can't have that.
  - azemetre 6y ago
    It's simple but can be very impractical. I grew in Tampa, FL (about 20 mins from Pasco county). Much of the state is suburban hell and requires a car to get anywhere. Entire cities are designed to not be walkable. Public transit is even worse, to give an example how bad it can be. When I was in college it took my 2-hours taking the bus versus a 20 minute car ride. Now imagine that you have an average school with average facilities, how are you going to transport kids to and from school afterhours? What if you need to use facilities at another location because the nearest park is a 10-minute drive away? I know the org Strong Towns is very popular on here, and I think we are going to start to see how costly suburban planning is going to become within the next decade.
    - anonAndOn 6y ago
      You're going to transport kids the same way I did it and the same way countless other kids did it since Henry Ford started mass producing the Model T, by bumming rides off of the guy/girl who has a car.
- caseysoftware 6y ago
  In many places, the schools aren't even open.. that seems like a good first step. Then let's keep the gyms open longer.
  - avmich 6y ago
    In pandemic times, school buildings are (mostly) closed, but schools are open virtually. Not a perfect solution for the problem, but a necessity of the situation. Will get better hopefully soon.
yellowapple 6y ago
"How do we stop kids from becoming criminals? I know! Let's harass kids and their families until they become criminals! What could go wrong?"
- kbenson 6y ago
  It's worse than that, which would be a misguided attempt to help. As one former deputy described the program to reporters, the objective was to “make their lives miserable until they move or sue.” They aren't trying to stop the kids from becoming criminals, they are trying to get them to leave and be the criminals they assume they'll be elsewhere by harassing them. This is just a next-level variation of shipping homeless to other cities.
- phkahler 6y ago
  Right. Even if we were to accept the premise that the identified kids are at increased risk of becoming criminals, the things they are doing are not preventive and are actually pushing the kids down the path they (supposedly) want to keep them off.
dmingod666 6y ago
No budget 'minority report (card)'
chmod600 6y ago
So a local sheriff is behaving badly. Sounds like those people should get a new sheriff. What is the larger significance here?
- hirundo 6y ago
  He's doing for a county what China is doing for a country. Some of us are concerned that the missing 'r' will be gradually added.
  - chmod600 6y ago
    The US is more of a federal system which somewhat protects us. I doubt there will be a national law saying that local police should look for illegal chickens. So you just vote the local people out or move. Maybe I am too optimistic?
    - throwaway0a5e 6y ago
      > I doubt there will be a national law saying that local police should look for illegal chickens Replace chickens with guns or immigrants. State/Local enforcement of those sets of laws is already a highly contentious issue.
    - Larrikin 6y ago
      What do you do when the legislatures pass laws that make it harder and harder for the people being harassed to vote?
      - chmod600 6y ago
        We can scale any problem into a worldwide issue if we use our imagination. But at some point, a local issue is just a local issue.
        Larrikin 6y ago
        How is scaling to the state legislature scaling to a world wide issue?
comeonseriously 6y ago
When I was in HS, according to the risk factors on this page, I would have been labelled a future criminal. I was completely bored out of my mind in HS. I skipped. I slept in class. I was constantly in the office. My GPA sucked so I failed a year. Skip ahead and I have a BSCpE and am a pretty successful engineer.
- NorthOf33rd 6y ago
  It looks to me like I'd have been off-track. I was harassed by police because of the way I looked, but my family was not, nor was the harassment as structured as this. I lost 3 jobs in high school because I was late. I was late because the police were searching my vehicle. They never found anything or charged me with anything after 15 traffic stops inside a single year. I'm solidly successful now. But, I guarantee if the police had been just a little more deliberate about their harassment, had targeted my family, my 17 year old anti-establishment self would have acted out in ways that would have actually put me on the wrong track. Or, maybe they would have found something to actually charge me with something, even trivial? Or made something up? Or maybe my parents would have gotten fed up and taken it out on me? I feel for the kids in Pasco Co. This is state sponsored harassment, is almost certainly racist in application, and definitely does more harm than good.
fat_pikachu 6y ago
Why is “data driven” policing bad when we’re pretty much striving for “data driven” everything else in government? The EFF argues that the methods here are pseudo scientific, but they seem more rigorous than many of the other “data driven” methods governments are implementing in other contexts.
- Jtsummers 6y ago
  The data usually has clear biases present against certain ethnic groups and economic classes. Also you have to look into which laws are broken and feed into the data (again, reflects back on the first sentence). If jaywalking and other minor crimes go into the prediction algorithms, are those crimes treated equally throughout the area and population? Is it really the case that there's no jaywalking in the middle class neighborhoods or is it just that the police only apply it in the poor neighborhoods? This creates a bias in patrols where they step up in areas with more charges, which makes sense on the surface until you examine which areas those are and why they have more charges in that area or amongst that population. For a fuller treatment on this I recommend Weapons of Math Destruction by Cathy O'Neil (https://www.amazon.com/Weapons-Math-Destruction-Increases-Inequality/dp/0553418815 https://www.amazon.com/Weapons-Math-Destruction-Increases-In...).
- godelski 6y ago
  Usually it comes down to statistics being extremely difficult. If you base your model on historical data you are likely to have correlating factors with low economic status and race. You haven't actually abstracted out these concepts but rather baked them into the model. Latent variables are extremely difficult to remove from the system and as far as I'm aware no one has (afaik no one has done even a remotely good job at this, bordering/sometimes bad faith). We should strive more for data driven solutions, but we have a bad human element that will use data as a crutch rather than a resource. Given how we know the data often fails, this makes it difficult to put into use without amplifying those effects. (there's plenty of easily googleable/ddg-able sources you can find on this. Decades of material actually) While we're going data driven in many areas, you may notice that most of these areas don't have as much of a direct impact on a person's life as policing does. That gives more room for error. It sucks, but it isn't that big of a deal if you pay more than your neighbor for that flight to NYC. Move fast and break things doesn't work so well when "breaking things" results in "broken homes" and "broken lives". Maybe we need a different approach.
lacker 6y ago
I don’t support whatever these police are doing per se but this doesn’t seem like something the EFF should get involved in. What does this have to do with digital privacy or defending free speech? This is just a police department deciding where its police should be patrolling. Sure maybe they’re being too aggressive at citing people for illegal chickens in their backyard, but the EFF can’t just try to fight all forms of injustice everywhere, the organization needs to have some focus to be effective.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- CameronNemo 6y ago
  I somewhat agree, but I think there is a good position for the EFF to take here: student grades, attendance, and other data is private and should not be handed to or sold to law enforcement in bulk. It is not inherently digital or electronic data, but technology makes the data much more potent.
- xenocyon 6y ago
  The EFF is very interested in surveillance and misuse of personal data so it seems well within its mission.
- Nasrudith 6y ago
  The EFF was founded in the first place after the FBI was daft enough to raid Steve Jackson Games over a planned tabletop RPG supplement about hacking. Fighting against overzealous law enforcement stupidly attacking an innocent because of a bogeyman is incredibly on brand.
dec0dedab0de 6y ago
Regardless of what they're doing with it, noone should have access to a child's grades. This is outrageous.
neuro 6y ago
sheriff grady neighborhood
airhead969 6y ago
Oh, so precrime "enforcement" pantopticon like China. This is a moist dry-run to try out more undemocratic, diabolical tyrannical over-policing on Americans.

139 points by glitcher 6y ago

intpx 6y ago

How is this not a blatant violation of FERPA?

CameronNemo 6y ago
That is what I was thinking too. Don't sue the police. They will get any data they can get their hands on. Sue the school system that is supposed to be helping these children.
- colpabar 6y ago
  >Don't sue the police >Sue the school system No. The article states that the school already lost grant funding because an organization didn't like what they were doing. I'd also be willing to bet the school is doing this due to lack of funding to begin with. Taking even more of their funding away would not help anything.
  - jawns 6y ago
    I think you can simultaneously support schools being better funded through legitimate avenues while rejecting the notion that underfunded schools should be able to sell students' private information to make money. This is not the only way the school can obtain adequate funding.
    - colpabar 6y ago
      I should have been more clear in my comment, but I am not saying I think it's ok that the school did this. I was suggesting that they could have done it in a desperate attempt for funding. But my main point is that you shouldn't sue schools, because you're just taking (your own) money away from students.
      - jawns 6y ago
        > my main point is that you shouldn't sue schools, because you're just taking (your own) money away from students I respectfully disagree. The ability to sue public institutions -- schools, police departments, cities, etc. -- when they do wrong is key to accountability. It is never the preferred way, but sometimes it's a legitimate last resort. I also would not characterize it as taking your own money away from students. If a man was going to buy his daughter an expensive birthday present, but he drives drunk and crashes into my house, I might sue him, and he might have to give me the money he was planning to use to buy the present. But have I deprived the girl of her present, or has he? In the same way, it is the public institutions, and their leaders, who are at fault if they conduct themselves in a way that leads to legal liabilities, not the victims who sue. The students who are deprived of resources as a result of those legal liabilities should blame the school administration, not the victims.
Someone1234 6y ago
I just took at look at the law itself[0], and at least my non-lawyer reading of it doesn't seem to permit this type of broad un-targeted sharing. They can get records for specific investigations or safety incidents, but there's nothing in it that allows law enforcement a dragnet. So I don't understand how the school system is giving the police direct access to a student's grades? Seems unlawful. https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/20/1232g https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/20/1232g
mutagen 6y ago
It is a massive FERPA violation, according to the the following from a student privacy organization: https://studentprivacycompass.org/pasco/ https://studentprivacycompass.org/pasco/

belval 6y ago

> The ILP manual explains the program’s purpose is to identify youth “destined to a life of crime.” This is absurd. No one is destined to a life of crime. Poor wording aside, the idea behind the program itself would make sense if it was handled by child protection services and helped them identify youth with in a difficult situation that might benefit from being reoriented to a different path. I don't like seeing the police involved in those things, if anything we run the risk of antagonizing these kids and pushing them further down.

biomcgary 6y ago
One of my neighbors is a police officer and she is appalled by the behavior and decision making of child protection services. She described multiple occasions where she was required by law to accompany someone from CPS to take away a child in circumstances that were unwarranted and only happened because the family was too poor to fight a legal battle. The movie Evelyn (based on a true story) illustrates that this is a perennial problem.
- belval 6y ago
  Yeah, I don't live in the US but our child service is pretty bad as well. My point was more that whoever handles this should not have connections to law enforcement as it could ultimately widen the divide between the police and the communities.
- jawns 6y ago
  I think there's a lot of room for improvement for both law enforcement and CPS, but I agree with the comment you responded to. This seems more like it should be a social services intervention rather than a quasi-criminal investigation.
- throwaway0a5e 6y ago
  >occasions where she was required by law to accompany someone from CPS Transit police, campus police, environmental police, all these law enforcement agencies exist because the parents organizations so routinely need the threat of state violence to back them up in situations where they are doing the wrong thing or it is just not plain warranted that they cannot rely on whatever the existing police are to respond to their calls. (Likewise at the federal level, the ATF and ICE exist because the FBI didn't consider that stuff a serious problem but politicians did.) They need their-own bespoke police force to handle the calls that are so illegitimate that they would get blown off by any PD that has its own reputation and efficient resource allocation to worry about. If you need to go somewhere (like getting your stuff from an ex) where you have good reason to fear physical harm the police will generally go with you. It might take awhile but they usually will, eventually (extreme outliers like Detroit notwithstanding). The fact that CPS needs to pull legislative strings to get the cops to show up tells you a lot about how the cops regard their operations. If the cops felt they were helping remove children from bad situations with any semblance of regularity they would love to field those calls.

threatofrain 6y ago

> 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.” > In just five years, Nocco’s signature program has ensnared almost 1,000 people.

readflaggedcomm 6y ago

Officers tailing probationed bike thieves fight not crime but budget cuts.

bookmarkable 6y ago

Pasco, just north of Tampa Bay, was an armpit for the last 50 years and now is a highly desirable area with many enclaves of new homes in the former pasture land. This sort of automated targeting is gross, but unsurprising, especially in a Deep South, backwoods county trying to clean up its image with newer, wealthier residents.

istjohn 6y ago
That sounds about right. In another comment, I cited a story about how we closed public pools en masse when they were becoming integrated[1]. People would rather have no public goods at all than share them with people they look down on. 1. https://www.marketplace.org/2021/02/15/public-pools-used-to-be-everywhere-in-america-then-racism-shut-them-down/ https://www.marketplace.org/2021/02/15/public-pools-used-to-...
- latencyloser 6y ago
  Give me a break. I spent most of my life in this county and my family's been there for two generations prior. The "everything is racist" argument so poorly applies to the issues of these communities it's absolutely absurd. Come back when you find a different hammer.
  - Loughla 6y ago
    That's very hand-wavy and dismissive. Could you please elaborate on your beliefs?
    - latencyloser 6y ago
      The comment I was replying to cites an article about public pools and racist behaviors from 60+ years ago in entirely different communities that borders on a non-sequitur to these issues of community policing and does so as a commentary to the suggestion that these areas are "cleaning up their Deep south, backwoods" image by behaving this way, senselessly pushing the idea that racism is the cause of this. Talk about hand-wavy.

jeffbee 6y ago

Much of this just sounds like solid police work. If some kid steals a bicycle, the cops should hound their parents.

Jtsummers 6y ago
> After one 15-year-old was arrested for stealing bicycles out of a garage, the algorithm continuously dispatched police to harass him and his family. Over the span of five months, police went to his home 21 times. They also showed up at his gym and his parent’s place of work. Context from the article (I haven't dug into the sources), but if the kid was already charged (and after 5-months presumably sentenced) then this is way beyond what should be expected. And showing up at the parent's place of work could result in them losing their job which would be a net-negative for the family and the kid in question. It creates a downward spiral from deliberate police harassment. Which fits with the police's stated goal: > As one former deputy described the program to reporters, the objective was to “make their lives miserable until they move or sue.”
- jeffbee 6y ago
  We don't have enough context to evaluate these statements, and the EFF has a long history of misleading and exaggerated claims. It would be appropriate for the police to visit the parent's places of work if they suspect that the parent's claims about what they do in the daytime are lies. It is absolutely proper for the police to try to figure out how a family went so far off the rails that their teenage child is a burglar. Also I find the idea that the perpetrator's family may face "net-negative" consequences to lack empathy with the victim. Their family may have faced net-negative consequences from the absence of the bicycle. There's an entire famous film about this!
  - Jtsummers 6y ago
    Ah yes. A kid steals a bike, so lets try to deprive the family of livelihood and further the downward economic spiral that often leads to more crime. Good plan there, keeps the police in business.

upofadown 6y ago

The root issue seems to be that this particular police force is allowed to harass people for no good reason related to past or present crime. The goofy reasons they use to justify this behaviour are irrelevant.

throwaway0a5e 6y ago
The reason this police force is allowed and has the capacity to do this is because this is a gentrifying suburb of Tampa. Gentrifying suburbs have no shortage of people seeking to force conformism on everyone else, money available for boondoggle policing and poors (i.e. a large chunk of existing residents) who a subset of the new residents think need to be controlled for their own good.

madamelic 6y ago

My favorite part is the diagram where the police consider "hanging around in public" as a bad thing. I am not a crazy conspiracy theorist but seems like they want the streets and malls empty of people, everyone locked away in their jai-- I mean homes.

istjohn 6y ago
For real. The US vastly underinvests in public goods. Everyone would be better off if we had attractive and free and plentiful public pools, recreation centers, play grounds, and transportation. Instead we neglect these, so everyone wants a big backyard with a pool and expensive exercise equipment in the basement and two cars in the garage. It's massively inefficient. Why did we go down this path? Part of the answer is racism. See https://www.marketplace.org/2021/02/15/public-pools-used-to-be-everywhere-in-america-then-racism-shut-them-down/ https://www.marketplace.org/2021/02/15/public-pools-used-to-...
- tenebrisalietum 6y ago
  Public spaces are not places I like to be these days because: - someone's always playing music too loud, either from their car or their phone; - there seems to always be someone who is unwilling to control their children; - people get into fights, sometimes these escalate into serious safety issues. - someone is always trying to sell something or have unsolicited conversations about their religion; - recently in some places mentally ill people are doing unsafe things, such as drugs, etc. - people generally move around in fixed cliques and don't really interact beyond them - people are not socially conducive in this setting anyway. I'll say the public itself has decayed, likely due to economic factors, but no one is willing to fix that. So what's the point? If we're not going to fix the underlying social issues, I'd rather have multiple competing private spaces where someone can at least try to gateway out bad actors and there is some sort of incentive to enforce at least a minimum of behavior expectations for people within.
  - BoorishBears 6y ago
    I don't see a single thing here that's a new problem. The loud boombox is an icon of the 90s, kids used to run around outside more, not less, people are less religious than ever... Sounds to me like we just have a new class of people who want an oasis from the untouchables, which is fine But we shouldn't let that stop us from investing in public spaces.

anonAndOn 6y ago

You know what else fights juvenile crime? After school activities. I imagine you could save a lot of taxpayer money and fight crime if you just kept the HS gym open until 10pm.

api 6y ago
That's a simple solution. We can't have that.
- azemetre 6y ago
  It's simple but can be very impractical. I grew in Tampa, FL (about 20 mins from Pasco county). Much of the state is suburban hell and requires a car to get anywhere. Entire cities are designed to not be walkable. Public transit is even worse, to give an example how bad it can be. When I was in college it took my 2-hours taking the bus versus a 20 minute car ride. Now imagine that you have an average school with average facilities, how are you going to transport kids to and from school afterhours? What if you need to use facilities at another location because the nearest park is a 10-minute drive away? I know the org Strong Towns is very popular on here, and I think we are going to start to see how costly suburban planning is going to become within the next decade.
  - anonAndOn 6y ago
    You're going to transport kids the same way I did it and the same way countless other kids did it since Henry Ford started mass producing the Model T, by bumming rides off of the guy/girl who has a car.
caseysoftware 6y ago
In many places, the schools aren't even open.. that seems like a good first step. Then let's keep the gyms open longer.
- avmich 6y ago
  In pandemic times, school buildings are (mostly) closed, but schools are open virtually. Not a perfect solution for the problem, but a necessity of the situation. Will get better hopefully soon.

yellowapple 6y ago

"How do we stop kids from becoming criminals? I know! Let's harass kids and their families until they become criminals! What could go wrong?"

kbenson 6y ago
It's worse than that, which would be a misguided attempt to help. As one former deputy described the program to reporters, the objective was to “make their lives miserable until they move or sue.” They aren't trying to stop the kids from becoming criminals, they are trying to get them to leave and be the criminals they assume they'll be elsewhere by harassing them. This is just a next-level variation of shipping homeless to other cities.
phkahler 6y ago
Right. Even if we were to accept the premise that the identified kids are at increased risk of becoming criminals, the things they are doing are not preventive and are actually pushing the kids down the path they (supposedly) want to keep them off.

dmingod666 6y ago

No budget 'minority report (card)'

chmod600 6y ago

So a local sheriff is behaving badly. Sounds like those people should get a new sheriff. What is the larger significance here?

hirundo 6y ago
He's doing for a county what China is doing for a country. Some of us are concerned that the missing 'r' will be gradually added.
- chmod600 6y ago
  The US is more of a federal system which somewhat protects us. I doubt there will be a national law saying that local police should look for illegal chickens. So you just vote the local people out or move. Maybe I am too optimistic?
  - throwaway0a5e 6y ago
    > I doubt there will be a national law saying that local police should look for illegal chickens Replace chickens with guns or immigrants. State/Local enforcement of those sets of laws is already a highly contentious issue.
  - Larrikin 6y ago
    What do you do when the legislatures pass laws that make it harder and harder for the people being harassed to vote?
    - chmod600 6y ago
      We can scale any problem into a worldwide issue if we use our imagination. But at some point, a local issue is just a local issue.
      - Larrikin 6y ago
        How is scaling to the state legislature scaling to a world wide issue?

comeonseriously 6y ago

When I was in HS, according to the risk factors on this page, I would have been labelled a future criminal. I was completely bored out of my mind in HS. I skipped. I slept in class. I was constantly in the office. My GPA sucked so I failed a year. Skip ahead and I have a BSCpE and am a pretty successful engineer.

NorthOf33rd 6y ago
It looks to me like I'd have been off-track. I was harassed by police because of the way I looked, but my family was not, nor was the harassment as structured as this. I lost 3 jobs in high school because I was late. I was late because the police were searching my vehicle. They never found anything or charged me with anything after 15 traffic stops inside a single year. I'm solidly successful now. But, I guarantee if the police had been just a little more deliberate about their harassment, had targeted my family, my 17 year old anti-establishment self would have acted out in ways that would have actually put me on the wrong track. Or, maybe they would have found something to actually charge me with something, even trivial? Or made something up? Or maybe my parents would have gotten fed up and taken it out on me? I feel for the kids in Pasco Co. This is state sponsored harassment, is almost certainly racist in application, and definitely does more harm than good.

fat_pikachu 6y ago

Why is “data driven” policing bad when we’re pretty much striving for “data driven” everything else in government? The EFF argues that the methods here are pseudo scientific, but they seem more rigorous than many of the other “data driven” methods governments are implementing in other contexts.

Jtsummers 6y ago
The data usually has clear biases present against certain ethnic groups and economic classes. Also you have to look into which laws are broken and feed into the data (again, reflects back on the first sentence). If jaywalking and other minor crimes go into the prediction algorithms, are those crimes treated equally throughout the area and population? Is it really the case that there's no jaywalking in the middle class neighborhoods or is it just that the police only apply it in the poor neighborhoods? This creates a bias in patrols where they step up in areas with more charges, which makes sense on the surface until you examine which areas those are and why they have more charges in that area or amongst that population. For a fuller treatment on this I recommend Weapons of Math Destruction by Cathy O'Neil (https://www.amazon.com/Weapons-Math-Destruction-Increases-Inequality/dp/0553418815 https://www.amazon.com/Weapons-Math-Destruction-Increases-In...).
godelski 6y ago
Usually it comes down to statistics being extremely difficult. If you base your model on historical data you are likely to have correlating factors with low economic status and race. You haven't actually abstracted out these concepts but rather baked them into the model. Latent variables are extremely difficult to remove from the system and as far as I'm aware no one has (afaik no one has done even a remotely good job at this, bordering/sometimes bad faith). We should strive more for data driven solutions, but we have a bad human element that will use data as a crutch rather than a resource. Given how we know the data often fails, this makes it difficult to put into use without amplifying those effects. (there's plenty of easily googleable/ddg-able sources you can find on this. Decades of material actually) While we're going data driven in many areas, you may notice that most of these areas don't have as much of a direct impact on a person's life as policing does. That gives more room for error. It sucks, but it isn't that big of a deal if you pay more than your neighbor for that flight to NYC. Move fast and break things doesn't work so well when "breaking things" results in "broken homes" and "broken lives". Maybe we need a different approach.

lacker 6y ago

I don’t support whatever these police are doing per se but this doesn’t seem like something the EFF should get involved in. What does this have to do with digital privacy or defending free speech? This is just a police department deciding where its police should be patrolling. Sure maybe they’re being too aggressive at citing people for illegal chickens in their backyard, but the EFF can’t just try to fight all forms of injustice everywhere, the organization needs to have some focus to be effective.

deleted 6y ago
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CameronNemo 6y ago
I somewhat agree, but I think there is a good position for the EFF to take here: student grades, attendance, and other data is private and should not be handed to or sold to law enforcement in bulk. It is not inherently digital or electronic data, but technology makes the data much more potent.
xenocyon 6y ago
The EFF is very interested in surveillance and misuse of personal data so it seems well within its mission.
Nasrudith 6y ago
The EFF was founded in the first place after the FBI was daft enough to raid Steve Jackson Games over a planned tabletop RPG supplement about hacking. Fighting against overzealous law enforcement stupidly attacking an innocent because of a bogeyman is incredibly on brand.

dec0dedab0de 6y ago

Regardless of what they're doing with it, noone should have access to a child's grades. This is outrageous.

neuro 6y ago

sheriff grady neighborhood

airhead969 6y ago

Oh, so precrime "enforcement" pantopticon like China. This is a moist dry-run to try out more undemocratic, diabolical tyrannical over-policing on Americans.