Don’t Punish People for Crimes They Haven’t Committed Yet

W aiting for someone to commit a crime before inflicting punishment can make a law enforcement agency look soft, so Sheriff Chris Nocco decided to get a head start in Pasco County, Fla.

Using a crude computer algorithm, he identified the top 100 projected troublemakers in his community and started the penalty phase early. Instead of crime and punishment, he reversed the order and gave the people punishment and crime.

Nocco called this “intelligence led policing.” He organized the Strategic Targeted Area Response Team, a goon squad on a mission to harass. This is the term that task force members used to describe their behavior.

“We’re going to keep harassing them every single day,” one deputy tells another on bodycam video.

Task force members sometimes came multiple times a day, pounding on doors and windows, waking up residents in the middle of the night, and peppering relatives with questions.

Whenever possible, deputies cited families for petty code violations: missing house numbers on mailboxes, tall grass, yard debris, or a boat trailer parked in the wrong place. If people missed a hearing on their property citations, deputies arrested them for failure to appear.

All of this occurred during 13,000 visits to hundreds of homes across the county over a six-year period, ending in 2022.

Deputies also followed people and conducted bogus traffic stops. They accused Tammy Heilman of failing to wear a seat belt and forcibly removed her from her car while her daughter watched. Robert Jones, meanwhile, was arrested four times but never found guilty. No matter. Conviction was not necessarily the goal in Pasco County.

The object, which the agency laid out in an internal email, was to make life so miserable for people on the pre-crime list that they would “move away or go to prison.”

Targeted individuals — some as young as 16 — had no other way to end the harassment. Proving yourself innocent of a crime you have not yet committed is impossible. Tom Cruise’s character tries to clear himself in the sci-fi thriller Minority Report, but he never met Nocco.

“You’re messing around with an aggressive sheriff, Sheriff Nocco,” one deputy tells a targeted person’s father on bodycam video. “He’s not playing any games.”

Rather than accept the abuse, four victims sued in 2021. Our public-interest law firm, the Institute for Justice, represents them for free. After more than three years of legal wrangling, a trial in the case was set to begin on December 4. But on the eve of opening arguments, Nocco backed down and agreed to a six-figure settlement.

As part of the deal, the sheriff acknowledged multiple constitutional violations.

The agency, which frequently targeted relatives of anyone on the pre-crime list, admitted it violated the First Amendment, which guarantees freedom of association. The agency admitted it violated the Fourth Amendment, which protects people from unreasonable search and seizure. And the agency admitted it violated the 14th Amendment, which guarantees due process.

These are serious breaches of public trust. But despite conceding these points in court, Nocco continues to justify his “predictive policing” program in the media. “The Pasco Sheriff’s Office will never apologize for keeping our community safe,” he wrote in a statement.

This lack of remorse should concern anyone worried about policing via algorithm. Hollywood taps into this theme to scare movie audiences. But real-world examples exist.

Across the nation, judges use algorithms to decide whether criminal defendants should be granted bail pending trial. A recent study found that judges relied on algorithms for this purpose, even when they were “laden with measurement errors.”

At trial, meanwhile, defendants are convicted using black-box algorithms that purport to match faces, interpret complex DNA results, and shed light on other forensic evidence. The inner workings of these algorithms are often confidential, making them hard to challenge in court. But when the details have been disclosed, flaws have emerged.

Meanwhile, others outside Pasco County are forging ahead with efforts to predict crime before it happens. Researchers at the University of Chicago claim their machine-learning algorithm can predict crimes one week before they occur with 90 percent accuracy.

Efforts will continue, and algorithms will likely improve. But as Pasco County’s experience demonstrates, technology cannot become an excuse to do away with old-fashioned ideas of justice.

Robert Johnson is a senior attorney and Daryl James is a writer at the Institute for Justice in Arlington, Va.