Pasco County Sheriff Faces Lawsuit for Targeting ‘Criminals’ Before They Commit a Crime
A Pasco County Sheriff's Office is under scrutiny after Sheriff Chris Nocco implemented what he deemed to be “intelligence-led policing.” The Sheriff who spearheaded this futuristic police practice came under fire after the Tampa Bay Times broke the news detailing the harrowing accounts of residents in Pasco County who suffered because of this invasive policing.
The intelligence-led policing program was established by Pasco County Sheriff Chris Nocco when he took office in 2011. Using arrest histories and “unspecified intelligence” that included information found on police reports, the Sheriff's Office put together a list of individuals they deemed likely to commit a crime. Using this list, the Sheriff's Office routinely made visits to these individuals in what county residents have only been able to describe as harassing behavior. A number of the individuals targeted by the Sheriff's Office included middle and highschool aged children.
The Tampa Bay Times explained that the Sheriff's Office “sends deputies to find and interrogate anyone whose name appears, often without probable cause, a search warrant or evidence of a specific crime.” The Times adds, “They [deputies] 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.”
As a result of these predatory police practices, a federal lawsuit has been filed on behalf of four residents who say the Sheriff's program is unconstitutional. The Pasco County residents say that their 1st, 4th, and 14th Amendment rights were violated. They express in the lawsuit, “The Pasco County Sheriff’s Office punishes people for crimes they have not yet committed and may never commit. It first predicts that certain people may commit future crimes, and then it harasses these people—and their relatives and friends—with relentless visits to their homes at all hours of the day, with unwarranted stops and seizures, and with repeated citations for petty code violations.” According to the lawsuit, residents of Pasco Country were not given their constitutional right to be secure in their own homes because they were constantly being targeted by the police.
The Sheriff's Office paints a very different picture than that portrayed in the lawsuit. In a statement published by the Tampa Bay Times, the Sheriff's Office defends the practice by saying, “Intelligence Led Policing (ILP) has worked to reduce property crimes in Pasco County and continues to work in agencies in our area that also use this model.” The statement adds, “This reduction in property crimes includes a 74.4% reduction in residential burglaries and a 20.7% reduction in auto thefts, along with an overall reduction of property crimes of 35.6%.”
The Times’ reporting indicates that although property crime had dropped in Pasco County and eight of the largest law enforcement agencies in Tampa, rates for violent crime have increased only in Pasco County.
The Sheriff’s Office has fought back against allegations stating, “The ILP system removes any opportunity for bias by removing descriptive features and focuses strictly on the criminal history of the individual, regardless of their race, gender, creed or any other identifying factors. We are surprised to see a system that is blind to anything but the criminal history of an individual is under attack, instead of being celebrated as an important step forward in our country.”
Matthew Barge, an expert in civil rights and police practices who has worked with police departments in Cleveland and Baltimore described the Pasco County Police practice as “One of the worst manifestations of the intersection of junk science and bad policing — and an absolute absence of common sense and humanity — that I have seen in my career."
Amanda Hunter, a Pasco County Sheriff’s Office spokeswoman, challenges the claims in the lawsuit. She states, “We look forward to defending any lawsuits in which we may be named in the proper venue and will not be party to litigation via the media.”
