[HN Gopher] Pasco County's Sheriff Must End Its Targeted Child H...
___________________________________________________________________
Pasco County's Sheriff Must End Its Targeted Child Harassment
Program
Author : glitcher
Score : 125 points
Date : 2021-03-23 15:12 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.eff.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.eff.org)
| fat_pikachu wrote:
| 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.
| Nasrudith wrote:
| That is sort of like asking "If having a sexual relationship is
| perfectly fine what is wrong with a boss dating their direct
| subordinate?" - the power dynamic changes things via coercion.
| This isn't like A/B testing two apparently nearly equally valid
| curriculums on classes.
|
| It is a self-fuffilling prophecy in the case of policing - they
| will skew where they find crime more where they focus their
| efforts. And that is assuming honest mistakes instead of
| outright bias laundering operations.
| Jtsummers wrote:
| 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-In...).
| [deleted]
| godelski wrote:
| 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.
| belval wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| >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.
| sebastien_b wrote:
| I agree - as I was reading the article, I thought "they're
| using police as social workers again".
| dec0dedab0de wrote:
| Regardless of what they're doing with it, noone should have
| access to a child's grades. This is outrageous.
| threatofrain wrote:
| > 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.
| yellowapple wrote:
| "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?"
| phkahler wrote:
| 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.
| kbenson wrote:
| 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.
| chmod600 wrote:
| So a local sheriff is behaving badly. Sounds like those people
| should get a new sheriff. What is the larger significance here?
| jdavis703 wrote:
| They aren't the only law enforcement agency that attempts to
| predict future criminals. For example anyone can be put in
| California crime database called CalGang for activities such as
| eating lunch with a gang member. Cops will then give extra
| attention to people in this database. I think as people
| interested in technology we should be concerned about the
| algorithms and policies behind data-driven policing.
|
| Source: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/01/lapd-falsely-
| labelin...
| hirundo wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| What do you do when the legislatures pass laws that make it
| harder and harder for the people being harassed to vote?
| chmod600 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| How is scaling to the state legislature scaling to a
| world wide issue?
| jeffbee wrote:
| Much of this just sounds like solid police work. If some kid
| steals a bicycle, the cops _should_ hound their parents.
| wheaties wrote:
| No, no it doesn't. Here's another news source:
| https://projects.tampabay.com/projects/2020/investigations/p...
| mattnewton wrote:
| What does that achieve?
| steve76 wrote:
| A retreat to barbarity seems to be the most popular life
| choice today, as in behaving like an animal is the only thing
| that's authentic. The problem is the malice is still there
| driving it all. People who truly despise being restrained by
| laws stampede the heard off the cliff. On the way to the
| burning down of your own city other people built for you,
| here, get a credit card and phone plan.
|
| You can write all the news articles you want. You can sign
| all the legislation you want. The law is here to limit
| violence, not do what everyone agrees on, not to make
| everyone feel good. If the police don't do it, other people
| will. Business owners. Realtors. Other criminals. Foreign
| debt holders. Or even worse, nature, as in starvation,
| disease, exposure, trauma from accidents.
|
| It's not okay to be a victim. If you are robbed or attacked,
| it's not okay. Best way to end crime. Got your window broken,
| or your city burnt, or your border is opened? I'm not going
| to punish them anymore. I'm going to punish you.
|
| Watch crime drop real fast after that one.
| Jtsummers wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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!
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| The goal of handling young criminals should be
| rehabilitation, not forcing the entire family into a spiral
| of desperation.
| jeffbee wrote:
| Maybe the family is already desperate because the
| breadwinner goes to work every day as a manual laborer
| where the boss steals half his wages, the most common
| economic crime in America. That's something the cops can
| find out by visiting their place of work. You can't
| expect the cops to be effective if they aren't allowed to
| make contact with people in the social circles of known
| criminals.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| Contact is a bit different than harassment. There are
| instances of officers as role models and helping the
| community. This doesn't appear to be one.
| klyrs wrote:
| Do you have any evidence of the cops investigating the
| employers of these parents, or are you just spitballing
| on how cops might improve society if they were gunning
| for white-collar crime? Because that's not what cops do.
| That's what the Labor Relations Board does. I'd say to
| test it out yourself, dial 911 to report wage theft, but
| making false reports is a crime that I wouldn't recommend
| committing.
| Jtsummers wrote:
| 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.
| steve76 wrote:
| Maybe it's reversed. Families with no livelihood don't
| watch their kids. I suggest everyone cuts bait quick
| before they capsize the ship and kill us all.
|
| They have the self control to break into homes, to steal.
| But they don't have the self control to follow rules and
| live in a society hundreds of millions thrive in? I have
| zero sympathy. I know how truly awful people are. And
| they are everywhere because rich lawyers found a
| loophole, preying on people's naivete and conflict
| avoidance.
| dmingod666 wrote:
| No budget 'minority report (card)'
| lacker wrote:
| 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.
| CameronNemo wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| Nasrudith wrote:
| 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.
| xenocyon wrote:
| The EFF is very interested in surveillance and misuse of
| personal data so it seems well within its mission.
| readflaggedcomm wrote:
| Officers tailing probationed bike thieves fight not crime but
| budget cuts.
| bookmarkable wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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-...
| latencyloser wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| That's very hand-wavy and dismissive. Could you please
| elaborate on your beliefs?
| latencyloser wrote:
| 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.
| dccooper wrote:
| Give ME a break! I am ALSO from Pasco County and you well
| know the KKK used to sponsor road clean up in Moon Lake -
| so don't give me any of that "everything is fine and
| there's no racism problem here"
| latencyloser wrote:
| _Used to_. KKK cleaning up a stretch of road in a rural
| area 30 years ago doesn't mean there's an inherently a
| racist police force, voted in by the county constituents,
| currently. That's tenuous at best. The existence of
| racists in a subset of an area does not mean that the
| entire area is racist.
| BoorishBears wrote:
| Wait so is your problem that you don't understand when
| people say "place X is racist" they don't mean literally
| every single person in town is a racist?
| upofadown wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| comeonseriously wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| intpx wrote:
| How is this not a blatant violation of FERPA?
| CameronNemo wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| >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 wrote:
| 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.
| Someone1234 wrote:
| 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
| mutagen wrote:
| It is a massive FERPA violation, according to the the following
| from a student privacy organization:
|
| https://studentprivacycompass.org/pasco/
| madamelic wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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-...
| tenebrisalietum wrote:
| 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.
| throwaway0a5e wrote:
| What I'm hearing is that public places are not nice because
| not everyone treats them the way rich people treat public
| spaces.
|
| You list a bunch of complaints that seem reasonable
| individually but taken together basically boil down to
| complaining about the difference between rich and poor then
| end with a comment about how it might fix itself if
| everyone were better off (which seems uncomfortably close
| to "if we got rid of the poors").
|
| Indeed many problems would be solved with money but the
| primary difference between your sentiment and the kind of
| sentiments that result in the authoritarian programs that
| are the subject of TFA is the willingness to use the
| jackboot as a means to bring about the end you desire.
|
| There's a fine line between preventing the park from
| turning into a homeless camp and using the police to
| systematically people for smoking weed at the park.
| wanderer2323 wrote:
| Your experiences match mine. There are multiple replies to
| your post that try to reframe the problems you highlight as
| a class struggle or dismiss them altogether, as if blasting
| music in public places should be an acceptable norm. I want
| to highlight that I agree with you. Investing in public
| spaces makes no sense when the intended use is going to be
| disrupted by default.
| Supermancho wrote:
| > - someone's always playing music too loud, either from
| their car or their phone;
|
| Drug abuse masquerades as part of the homelessness problem
| in US urban areas throughout the USA.
|
| Many of the other things you list aren't true of public
| places anywhere in the US. Super-urban areas like Venice
| Beach CA or SoDo near Seattle, etc. you might get noise
| pollution, but I can't understand how this relates to
| "public places" in aggregate.
| BoorishBears wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| caseysoftware wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| api wrote:
| That's a simple solution. We can't have that.
| azemetre wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
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(page generated 2021-03-23 23:02 UTC)