As We Predicted … IJ Defeats Dystopian “Future Crime” Program

The sheriff of Pasco County, Florida, had an idea straight out of Minority Report.Rather than wait for crime to occur, he would use an algorithm to predict who would commit future crimes. 

The algorithm was little more than a glorified Excel spreadsheet, and the sheriff’s own officials acknowledged that they had no crystal ball. But even if the predictions were basically guesses, they came with real consequences. Deputies made regular home visits to targeted people, often late at night or early in the morning, and looked for reasons to bombard them with citations for picayune violations like tall grass, unvaccinated pets, or excessive window tint on parked cars.

The goal, as one deputy acknowledged in an email, was to “get them to move away or go to prison.” 

Many of the targeted people were under the age of 18, and the harassment extended to their parents. In a performance review, one deputy bragged that he issued one mother so many citations that she was evicted from her home. 

IJ sued in 2021 on behalf of four Pasco County residents—one who was on the list and three who were parents of listed children. The June 2021 article in this magazine announcing the case ended with a prediction: “We will remind Pasco County,” we wrote, “that the dystopian plotlines need to stay in works of fiction—not policy manuals.” 

Now our prediction has come true. 

On the eve of a three-week trial scheduled to begin in December 2024, the sheriff gave up and admitted that his “predictive policing” program violated the Constitution. The sheriff promised he had ended the program, and he promised (which we made a court-enforceable agreement) never to bring it back again. The sheriff also agreed to pay our clients a six-figure sum for what they had to endure. 

IJ lawyers love to fight, and, on a personal level, we were looking forward to going to trial to expose the sheriff’s misdeeds. We had hours of body camera footage ready to play, along with hundreds of pages of the sheriff’s own internal documents. The professor who invented the idea of “predictive policing” was set to testify that the sheriff’s program was a bastardization of his life’s work—as ill-conceived as it was unconstitutional. 

It would have been a fun trial. But, at some point, when the other side says you win, then you win. 

When we filed the case, our goal was to so thoroughly discredit Pasco’s program that it would never be copied. 

That goal has been achieved. From now on, Pasco’s program will stand as a cautionary tale for other law enforcement officials—an idea so unconstitutional that the sheriff was forced to give up, rather than defend himself at trial. 

Meanwhile, as you read in this issue, we’re standing guard against other technological innovations that treat the innocent like criminals with no regard for constitutional safeguards. 

And if, despite all that, somebody is foolish enough to try this idea again, we can offer another prediction: We’ll be there to make sure they regret the choice.

Robert Johnson is an IJ senior attorney.