Pasco’s sheriff created a futuristic program to stop crime before it happens.
It monitors and harasses families across the county.
Lengthy article about the program. Read the entire piece here: https://projects.tampabay.com/projec...-led-policing/
A small excerpt: Potential prolific offenders are first identified using an algorithm the department invented that gives people scores based on their criminal records. People get points each time they’re arrested, even when the charges are dropped. They get points for merely being a suspect.
The manual says people’s scores are “enhanced” — it does not say by how much — if they miss court dates, violate their probation or appear in five or more police reports, even if they were listed as a witness or the victim. ...
Rodgers and his team would show up at people’s homes just to make them uncomfortable, he said. They didn’t always log the contacts in the agency’s official records. He recalled parking five patrol cars outside one target’s home all night and visiting some as many as six times in a single day.
They would do the same to targets’ friends, relatives and other “associates,” he said.
“Those associates might have nothing to do with the offender,” Rodgers said. But as long as the analysts listed them in the system, “we’d harass them too,” he said.
If the targets, their family members or associates wouldn’t speak to deputies or answer questions, STAR team deputies were told to look for code enforcement violations like faded mailbox numbers, a forgotten bag of trash or overgrown grass, Rodgers said.
“We would literally go out there and take a tape measure and measure the grass if somebody didn’t want to cooperate with us,” he said.
Rodgers said people sometimes would fail to pay the fine, which would result in a warrant being issued for their arrest.
“We’d get them one way or another,” he said. ...