My favorite part is the diagram where the police consider "hanging around in public" as a bad thing.<p>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.
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.
> 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.<p>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.<p>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.
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.
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.
"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?"
Why is “data driven” policing bad when we’re pretty much striving for “data driven” everything else in government?<p>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.
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.
> 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.<p>> 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.<p>> 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.<p>> One former deputy described the directive like this: “Make their lives miserable until they move or sue.”<p>> In just five years, Nocco’s signature program has ensnared almost 1,000 people.
Oh, so precrime "enforcement" pantopticon like China. This is a moist dry-run to try out more undemocratic, diabolical tyrannical over-policing on Americans.
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.