“Last summer, the Sheriff’s Office announced plans to begin keeping tabs on people who have been repeatedly committed to psychiatric hospitals.”
People are going to die because of that.
There is a close friend of mine who, if unlucky enough to live in that hellhole, would have her life made miserable by this. She’s a nurse who’s never committed a crime in her life. She’s also bipolar, suicidal, deals with major depression, and has a less-than-supportive family, so she’s been committed a few times. Being harassed by hyperzealous cops who think they’re fighting terrorists is exactly the sort of thing that could push her over the edge.
I think—and hope—that this is what does them in. It should never have gotten to this point, but they can wave around terms like “reduced crime” and as long as it’s just the bad guys who are being targeted, no one cares.
But I suspect there will be a point soon enough where the sheriff here will find himself answering questions about why his department drove to suicide a mentally ill person with no criminal record, and I hope to god the resulting consequences put an end to this un-American madness, here and everywhere else.
I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but my father has been practicing civil rights law in central Florida for several decades now, and he's brought multiple lawsuits against police departments there which are very similar to the situation you're describing. In one instance, a young mother with anorexia and mental health issues died after a 300-pound corrections officer sat on her to 'calm her down' until she asphyxiated in her jail cell with multiple broken ribs. This was all recorded on video. She'd been arrested for something along the lines of making a disturbance related to her psychological problems.
There have never been any systemic changes implemented as a result of these lawsuits. If the case goes 'well', the department will pay restitution to surviving family members, but damages for police negligence are tightly capped in Florida, and the department will frequently attribute full blame to the individual officer in question rather than give the impression of general negligence or training problems, which are some of the very narrow means of avoiding the damages cap and making them actually take notice. My impression is that most departments in central Florida treat these cases as the cost of doing business, which is extremely depressing and also indicative of how the cops down there actually feel and act, unfortunately.
A similar situation occurred in Rochester NY in March. Police called on a guy who was acting out, possibly due to having ingested PCP earlier. He was obeying the officers commands and had been handcuffed, but was acting erratically by spitting at them. So they put a "spit hood" over his head, then held him to the ground until he passed out and his heart stopped. Nothing about how the police responded is humane.
It's important to note that, in America, any police enforcement comes with a chance of death or injury. When we make little laws (jaywalking or whatnot), we should be careful to keep this in mind.
I'm just amazed that you can declare this and nobody makes any comment. How is this not a completely outragious statement? What type of society can tolorate the police being a net risk to the people they are ostensibly there to protect.
Ok, yes I know I'm completely ignorant of how the US works. The thing that scares me that your society is infecious, and I never want to see this in my part of the world.
I don't think you realize how quickly and universally the people of Pasco county (or really, a majority of most US counties) will praise the sheriff for protecting good people from methheads, criminals, and white trash. I can almost hear the responses: "If they didn't want to get killed, they should have gotten a job, taken their meds, and respected the police."
The general population can be extremely cruel and heartless if the consequences are hidden from them. And they specifically reward people that hide the costs and consequences of these actions.
>I don't think you realize how quickly and universally the people of Pasco county will praise the sheriff for protecting good people from methheads, criminals, and white trash.
Pasco's demographic is heavily retiree and red voting - especially on the west side, where Nocco is based. I can affirm that is how our voting blocs think.
Of note, we're also one of the whitest counties in America.
I'm a 30y Pasco resident and (historically) a Nocco apologist.
I'm also consistently critical of police mistreatment of citizens and have often exampled Nocco as an example of a better-sherrif-than-most. You can imagine my feelings as I'm sorting thru this TBT article.
I have 2 things to bring up. First is that Nocco replaced Bob White, who unexpectedly retired mid-term. White was a awful sheriff, obsessed with budgets. He fired older experienced officers (& was sued), replacing them with fresh academy graduates. The result was terrible deputy judgment for complex situations & officers shaking with rage during totally routine traffic stops. I suspect White was forced out of office. At least I hope that's how it happened.
Under Nocco's tenure all of that got better. In the first 6 months he twice returned sizable funds to the county. There were a handful of actions he took that I held up as an example of what a good sheriff might look like (in contrast to Grady Judd, in nearby Polk county).
I strongly believe the path to better police lies thru better police chiefs. Nocco's tenure likely helped me form that opinion. He made bad choices as well but my overall assessment was positive.
-- Have to run out. I'll be back to append my 2nd point.
My 2nd point is that Nocco must have worked at hiding this predictive policing program from us. I've never heard a word about it. The PCSO is a mid sized police dept & it's common for locals to know any number of deputies and staff there. I worked in law for 2 years right by the PSCO West Op Ctr and I never caught wind of the program. There is one county commissioner I trust and I'm more than a little curious if that person knew.
To my point: Nocco did not proactively disclose this to the community. Beyond that, it's likely he fought to conceal it's existence. Purposefully hiding this ethically questionable program (for years) is beyond unacceptable; it's a betrayal. And the program itself is a soft model of what's wrong with American policing. Segmenting the population into friends and enemies is a profoundly dark and dangerous mindset to adopt.
In no way is this okay for us.
Which ultimately leaves me with a quandary. If Nocco every runs up against a R challenger, there's a strong chance that his opponent will be groomed & wholly owned by shady local political/business interests. I've seen a previous sheriff act as a defacto arm of local businesses. I even once had a client who had influence in that sheriff's dept. I'm not aware of any corrupt behavior but the obviousness of the influence was unsettling.
More recently, there has been an overt attempt to replace an ethical elected official with a groomed, inexperienced lackey. It was an unsuccessful attempt, thankfully, but it shows that that both the machinery and desire are in place.
I could wind up with a choice to vote for Nocco or the local chamber's sock puppet. At the moment, I'm not clear what I'd do.
Given the choices you presented I think Nocco would still be the best option. That doesn't make him a good option.
If what you say about community involvement and general transparency is true then maybe Nocco is still redeemable. With your involvement at the local level it sounds like some additional oversight is the best solution.
Since Nocco has proven he can't be trusted to run the department with the current amount of oversight I think additional community oversight of all police spending is a reasonable solution.
This solves the problem regardless of who happens to be Sheriff, even if that does turn out to be a local business puppet.
Halfway into the article it started reminding me of the informant networks of the USSR. Officers peeping through windows, feeding data into the system about the target's friends and family while also fining them for any unrelated arbitrary misdemeanor. This is not what crime prevention looks like in a democracy.
Pasco: “Make their lives miserable until they move or sue.”
Stasi: "The security service's goal was to use Zersetzung to 'switch off' regime opponents. After months and even years of Zersetzung a victim's domestic problems grew so large, so debilitating, and so psychologically burdensome that they would lose the will to struggle against the East German state." [1]
Except this surveillance machine is even more stupid. The USSR was at least ostensibly protecting its power structure from internal opposition.
These floridian police are basically grooming kids to become criminals by giving them records and harassing their families until they fall unto hardship.
These floridian police are basically grooming kids to become criminals
What if that was the point? The system is making work to justify its continued existence. The police aren't working for you, they are working for the sheriff, and these interest do not match.
Could be. The current fight around felons receiving their voting rights in Florida adds another incentive here: the justice system was/is being used to suppress votes by aggressively penalizing kids to take away their voting rights. You're basically picking who gets to vote at that point.
This is a sherrif too, so they're elected, not neccesarily by any sort of experience or merit.
Nobody likes to hear it, but I'm willing to bet this person has been in office for a while. Tough on crime is popular among "model citizen" voters even if it utilizes dystopic tactics.
Their grass might be 1/4" too long, or they might not have numbers on their mailbox (examples of justification for police harassment from the article).
That was very explicitly the point. We now have top Nixon advisors explaining that they couldn't make hippies or black people illegal, but they could do it by proxy with "the war on drugs" [1].
Exactly, it is in the interest of police to create more criminals so they can justify their work. It seems absurd when clearly stated, but that is the end result of what they do.
Manufacturing your own criminals has a variety of attractive aspects. Obviously, you know how to find them so the work is easier. But you also get to tailor the charges to whatever's best for your department/career, arrange PR for the arrests and so on.
This is why, for instance, the FBI does it so much.
How does this not protect the current power structure? It feeds people into for profit prisons and also suppresses voting rights and job opportunities for anyone who gets a record.
> These floridian police are basically grooming kids to become criminals by giving them records and harassing their families until they fall unto hardship.
This. How can you expect these kids to grow up and be productive members of society [0] when you make it all but impossible to get a decent job later!?
It strikes me this is likely to be very self-reinforcing, too. If the people they target end up in jail, you can almost guarantee that it'll be used as a metric that their junk science is working.
It's probably a very effective way to weaponise "three strikes" too.
Don’t think about the system as a whole, think about the motivation of individual parts of the system, since often individual parts can have motivations that are unique and potentially counter productive.
So rather than asking “why does the government do this”, ask “how does this help the police”, since that’s the part of the government doing that.
> The USSR was at least ostensibly protecting its power structure from internal opposition.
It was not, most of the time they were harassing outliers, not people who wanted to make a regime change. Some examples: Religious people, people who listened to western music, men who had long hair (you were assumed to be a fan of the western hippie culture), people with noble ancestry if they did not show support for the communist party,..
Can I say this is probably the best presentation of journalism I've seen in a while. It's long form, they have an entire multi-paragraph section on how they retrieved and processed all the date after the footer, and they release the footage. I feel like most news sources at this point would have just a single edited shocker video and then told us to trust them that they have hundreds more hours of police abuse.
Any time your webpage hijacks scrolling to the point it needs to be stated multiple times to scroll down, something is wrong. Yes, it is a good write up, and the video provided is good corroboration. I just don't understand how something so basic like scrolling is deemed as improved by taking it over with javascript.
Cops are humans, yet as a human being, how in the world does any of this stuff seem like a good idea? How jaded have you become in the world where this kind of behavior seems acceptable?
It's actually easy to get there, you just have to believe that your group is inherently superior to outsiders. You owe them nothing, you try to outcompete them. That's the morality behind the cops, and it should terrify you.
As a general rule, you can't rely on people in positions of authority to behave themselves. If there are limited consequences for misbehavior, this is unfortunately more or less the expected outcome.
This is an interesting observation because historically in East Asia the two are treated as a continuum. It's not uncommon to see former criminals or gangs being employed to fight other criminals in pre-modern China. A similar practice survives even to this day in Japan.
The first lesson in any data science program covers the explict and implicit biases as well as the difference between correlation and causation. It seems the people involved in this system dont even have this basic knowledge.
We are reaping what we have sown. Science turned into the new state religion and now authoritarians are misusing it believing they can do no harm because God (erm, Science rather) is on their side
Florida is heinous. Statewide voted overwhelmingly to restore rights to returning citizens in a constitutional amendment.
Then, Republicans who control the state leg & Gov. DeSantis passed a poll-tax which virtually excludes 1 million or more citizens who served their time from voting. It's disgusting. It's being litigated but it's too late for this election.... They passed the law a couple weeks before a previous election the timing was on purpose.
There is no statewide easy system/paperwork for most of these citizens to even know how much they owe in ridiculous court fees etc. Let alone it seems a vast majority can't afford to pay if they are able to ever find out. It's indentured servitude to a criminal system (i'm calling the state the criminal in that sentence).
I feel so hopeless about our country. I work in politics. I used to feel optimistic and good about the work we/I have accomplished and making incremental progress. But over the last two years I've grown this close to completely giving up - which feels disgusting. I hate that we've strayed this far. It feels intentional and as someone with a relatively large amount of power I feel virtually powerless.
If you can, start a blog. Don't put sensational stuff on it, just… write your thoughts. The laws going on, how you feel about it, that kind of thing.
If you can provide more transparency to your citizens, even if it's just a public diary… either it'll help solve the problems, or it'll help the revolution start a day earlier. (Which depends entirely on whether the people we've trusted with power start using it for the things we gave them the power to do.)
The US is transforming itself into a hellhole because part of the country (represented mostly by republicans) cannot accept democracy and want to transform the country into (or maintain it as, you decide) a white supremacy state.
Once the country becomes a police state, democracy isn't really possible anymore because the police gains an inordinate amount of power relative to the people.
The defining aspect of democracy isn't really elections, it's how much power the average person has and how equitable that distribution is.
Every time I read these, it's just horrible science and bad math
"The Sheriff’s Office said its program was designed to reduce bias in policing by using objective data. And it provided statistics showing a decline in burglaries, larcenies and auto thefts since the program began in 2011."
Oh really? Where's your control? What did you control for? What were the other factors?
Perhaps it's the same as everywhere else. Maybe people feel more intimidated so they don't report crime. These measurements are self reported and after more intimidation and fear perhaps there's less self reporting...
It's unqualified people making incompetent assessments and unilaterally dictating public policy with gobs of taxpayer money to do it. Just atrocious
The article says the 7 surrounding counties experienced similar drops in property crime, and Pasco (the subject of the article) was the only one where violent crime increased.
Yes, thank you to the journalists for not letting that slide. We should probably be doing more than just claiming the reasoning is faulty and invalid on some websites though
Where are the "good guys" fighting against this sort of oppression? Are they relegated to coding encrypted messaging apps or is there a strong network of technologists who are working on legal ways to foil these types of systems?
The best answer is to make this kind of thing illegal. The technological shift has outpaced our legal framework for privacy and ownership of our information is not yet a fully protected human right. Support people who are advocating for legal change.
Electronic Privacy Information Center - lobbyist group based on DC
In all honesty, in such situations where persons have become the target of focused policing, it may be time to move cities. Or even move states. Being "in the system" is not a crime but if cops are poking around your house on a weekly/daily basis an incident is inevitable. The time to move is prior to that moment.
This may look like defeat. It is. At the larger scale this would mean cops are running certain people out of town. That is evil. But at the scale of an individual or family, particularly when mental health is an issue, what is best is to not be involved in an escalating situation. Pull up stakes and move somewhere with less oppressive policies.
Moving is expensive, and leaving a city means leaving behind existing support networks (friends, family, etc.). I'd imagine many people don't have that kind of mobility and moving is simply not an option.
MLK had a quote about injustice that seems highly relevant to this kind of thing.
I would prefer to fight the fires where they start. There are half a dozen states barreling toward a cliff because a generation of Californian's were told "just leave if you don't like it" (and if you don't like that example I could just as easily come up with an East coast one). Price out a condo in Denver if you don't believe me.
I assume they meant "barreling towards the exact same problems and policies that make California an unlivable hellhole today." That's usually the context when people talk about Californians migrating to other Western states.
To everyone saying the title was sensationalized and that it's only one county in Florida, I welcome you to come visit my state.
This kind of stuff is widespread in Florida. Sheriff Gualtieri, Grady Judd, Billy Woods, Darryl Daniels, ex Sheriff Mike Scott, Ric Bradshaw, and I could go on and on and on.
Look across the vast swaths of rural land in the landlocked parts of Florida and you'll find the only industry are prisons and policing.
The title you submitted ("Florida is a police state") badly broke the HN guideline against editorializing in titles:
"Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize."
Accounts that do that eventually lose submission privileges, so please don't do that. If you want to offer your interpretation of the article or the facts, that's totally fine, but do it in the comments, so your view is on a level playing field with everyone else's. On HN, being the one to submit a story doesn't confer any special rights over it. This is important because titles have by far the biggest influence.
Posted article sez: "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 mostly grilled him about his friends..."
"you are legally obligated to tell the cop your name and what you're doing at that very moment. Other than that, Duane says, you should fall back on four short words: "I want a lawyer."
I was thinking this sounded a lot like Minority Report. Then the article said that this was designed to be exactly like Minority Report. Talk about missing the moral of the story.
It’s like reading the Lorax and coming away with the idea that the environment should be exploited for profit.
Also, in Minority Report, they stopped violent crime in the act - the person had gotten to the point where they were actually going to commit it. This article is about messing up the lives of suspects and their families to "prevent" them from committing unknown, undisclosed crimes at some point in the future.
Something along these lines graced HN's front page recently, but I'll repeat my comment from there: Read "Weapons of Math Destruction" by Cathy O'Neil. Truly frightening.
> Pasco’s sheriff created a futuristic program to stop crime before it happens.
That title would not be critical at all. This is about surveillance tech and systemic oppression. I think the title is very fitting.
"As they make checks, deputies feed information back into the system, not just on the people they target, but on family members, friends and anyone else in the target’s orbit.
In the past two years alone, two of the nation’s largest law enforcement agencies have scrapped similar programs following public outcries and reports documenting serious flaws."
and
"Criminal justice experts said they were stunned by the agency’s practices. They compared the tactics to child abuse, mafia harassment and surveillance that could be expected under an authoritarian regime."
Even if "police state" is an appropriate characterization, it's surely wrong for the title to say that all of Florida is subject to this one county's program.
It's odd how their poster-boy was arrested for stealing a motorized bicycle out of someone's carport. That's far from murder, but not exactly an indicator that the teen is headed on the right path. Seems to be exactly the kind of person who may need some guidance.
Then the author conspicuously leaves out important information. They say targets are selected based on information about their family, but doesn't go into the teen's parent's criminal history. If his father's in prison and his mom has a serious record, and now he's heading down the same path.. that's relevant and necessary information.
It also says the police visited his house 20+ times and they often stop at people's houses without a warrant... but they don't actually say that the police stopped at his house 20+ times without a warrant/reason. They just hope the reader will assume that.
Definitely casting the story in the light they want to cast it in, and omitting exculpatory evidence.
It sounds an awful lot more like you're trying to find any sliver of "this isn't so bad" and "but they didn't tell ALL the facts so BIAS" when the report goes over many many other stories in detail and shows how many of them are worse than your cherry picked poster boy example.
This department, this sheriff, and everyone associated with the data entry for this whole program need to be removed from any law enforcement / security positions anywhere, and really should be required to see a therapist themselves for agreeing to contribute to this kind of harassment against others.
I think you missed the part where the kid hasn't gotten in trouble since. It seems to me that they are harassing the kid because they feel a need to harass someone and at least with this kid, the bootlickers have a past mistake to point at as "good reason". (scare quotes because the kid got in trouble once, then didn't anymore, not actually a bad path, just a bad choice once - therefore not even a remotely accurate reason. unless you love that boot flavor that is).
You can't attack another user like this on HN, regardless of how wrong they are or you feel they are. Please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when commenting here.
Yes I can, I just did. You might ban me, it might be against the rules, but I can. Also if someone is objectively an ass, it's not an attack, it's just a statement of fact. The science is in, and that guy's an ass.
Edit: sorry, this guy just got me going. I shouldn't feed the trolls.
People are going to die because of that.
There is a close friend of mine who, if unlucky enough to live in that hellhole, would have her life made miserable by this. She’s a nurse who’s never committed a crime in her life. She’s also bipolar, suicidal, deals with major depression, and has a less-than-supportive family, so she’s been committed a few times. Being harassed by hyperzealous cops who think they’re fighting terrorists is exactly the sort of thing that could push her over the edge.
I think—and hope—that this is what does them in. It should never have gotten to this point, but they can wave around terms like “reduced crime” and as long as it’s just the bad guys who are being targeted, no one cares.
But I suspect there will be a point soon enough where the sheriff here will find himself answering questions about why his department drove to suicide a mentally ill person with no criminal record, and I hope to god the resulting consequences put an end to this un-American madness, here and everywhere else.