Pasco County’s Sheriff Must End Its Targeted Child Harassment Program
eff.org
eff.org
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.
Why did we go down this path? Part of the answer is racism. See https://www.marketplace.org/2021/02/15/public-pools-used-to-...
- someone's always playing music too loud, either from their car or their phone;
- there seems to always be someone who is unwilling to control their children;
- people get into fights, sometimes these escalate into serious safety issues.
- someone is always trying to sell something or have unsolicited conversations about their religion;
- recently in some places mentally ill people are doing unsafe things, such as drugs, etc.
- people generally move around in fixed cliques and don't really interact beyond them - people are not socially conducive in this setting anyway.
I'll say the public itself has decayed, likely due to economic factors, but no one is willing to fix that.
So what's the point? If we're not going to fix the underlying social issues, I'd rather have multiple competing private spaces where someone can at least try to gateway out bad actors and there is some sort of incentive to enforce at least a minimum of behavior expectations for people within.
The loud boombox is an icon of the 90s, kids used to run around outside more, not less, people are less religious than ever...
Sounds to me like we just have a new class of people who want an oasis from the untouchables, which is fine
But we shouldn't let that stop us from investing in public spaces.
You list a bunch of complaints that seem reasonable individually but taken together basically boil down to complaining about the difference between rich and poor then end with a comment about how it might fix itself if everyone were better off (which seems uncomfortably close to "if we got rid of the poors").
Indeed many problems would be solved with money but the primary difference between your sentiment and the kind of sentiments that result in the authoritarian programs that are the subject of TFA is the willingness to use the jackboot as a means to bring about the end you desire.
There's a fine line between preventing the park from turning into a homeless camp and using the police to systematically people for smoking weed at the park.
Either we get a set of norms that allow people from different walks of life to coexist in the same spaces, or we wind up segregated.
"Complaints that seem reasonable individually" are still reasonable together, in fact much more important taken together. I don't like loud children, but I can put up with that. I can put up with loud music. I can put up with walking past a tent or two, maybe even with a fight nearby if I feel it's not going to spill over. At some point though, the threshold is crossed and I don't want to put up with these anymore.
As far as fights, drugs, etc. I don't think the public has "degraded"; the root of the problem, I believe, is lack of enforcement of the rules. First, that allows shitty people (I don't care if they are poor or not) to get away with shitty things in the first place. Second, it has a cascading effect where such behavior is normalized. Third, it clearly communicates to everyone else that they are on their own when this kind of stuff happens. The logical response is to move away.
Drug abuse masquerades as part of the homelessness problem in US urban areas throughout the USA.
Many of the other things you list aren't true of public places anywhere in the US. Super-urban areas like Venice Beach CA or SoDo near Seattle, etc. you might get noise pollution, but I can't understand how this relates to "public places" in aggregate.
Much of the state is suburban hell and requires a car to get anywhere. Entire cities are designed to not be walkable. Public transit is even worse, to give an example how bad it can be. When I was in college it took my 2-hours taking the bus versus a 20 minute car ride.
Now imagine that you have an average school with average facilities, how are you going to transport kids to and from school afterhours? What if you need to use facilities at another location because the nearest park is a 10-minute drive away?
I know the org Strong Towns is very popular on here, and I think we are going to start to see how costly suburban planning is going to become within the next decade.
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.
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.
Transit police, campus police, environmental police, all these law enforcement agencies exist because the parents organizations so routinely need the threat of state violence to back them up in situations where they are doing the wrong thing or it is just not plain warranted that they cannot rely on whatever the existing police are to respond to their calls. (Likewise at the federal level, the ATF and ICE exist because the FBI didn't consider that stuff a serious problem but politicians did.) They need their-own bespoke police force to handle the calls that are so illegitimate that they would get blown off by any PD that has its own reputation and efficient resource allocation to worry about.
If you need to go somewhere (like getting your stuff from an ex) where you have good reason to fear physical harm the police will generally go with you. It might take awhile but they usually will, eventually (extreme outliers like Detroit notwithstanding).
The fact that CPS needs to pull legislative strings to get the cops to show up tells you a lot about how the cops regard their operations. If the cops felt they were helping remove children from bad situations with any semblance of regularity they would love to field those calls.
They never found anything or charged me with anything after 15 traffic stops inside a single year.
I'm solidly successful now. But, I guarantee if the police had been just a little more deliberate about their harassment, had targeted my family, my 17 year old anti-establishment self would have acted out in ways that would have actually put me on the wrong track. Or, maybe they would have found something to actually charge me with something, even trivial? Or made something up? Or maybe my parents would have gotten fed up and taken it out on me?
I feel for the kids in Pasco Co. This is state sponsored harassment, is almost certainly racist in application, and definitely does more harm than good.
1. https://www.marketplace.org/2021/02/15/public-pools-used-to-...
As one former deputy described the program to reporters, the objective was to “make their lives miserable until they move or sue.”
They aren't trying to stop the kids from becoming criminals, they are trying to get them to leave and be the criminals they assume they'll be elsewhere by harassing them. This is just a next-level variation of shipping homeless to other cities.
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.
For a fuller treatment on this I recommend Weapons of Math Destruction by Cathy O'Neil (https://www.amazon.com/Weapons-Math-Destruction-Increases-In...).
If you base your model on historical data you are likely to have correlating factors with low economic status and race. You haven't actually abstracted out these concepts but rather baked them into the model. Latent variables are extremely difficult to remove from the system and as far as I'm aware no one has (afaik no one has done even a remotely good job at this, bordering/sometimes bad faith).
We should strive more for data driven solutions, but we have a bad human element that will use data as a crutch rather than a resource. Given how we know the data often fails, this makes it difficult to put into use without amplifying those effects. (there's plenty of easily googleable/ddg-able sources you can find on this. Decades of material actually)
While we're going data driven in many areas, you may notice that most of these areas don't have as much of a direct impact on a person's life as policing does. That gives more room for error. It sucks, but it isn't that big of a deal if you pay more than your neighbor for that flight to NYC. Move fast and break things doesn't work so well when "breaking things" results in "broken homes" and "broken lives". Maybe we need a different approach.
It is a self-fuffilling prophecy in the case of policing - they will skew where they find crime more where they focus their efforts. And that is assuming honest mistakes instead of outright bias laundering operations.
>Sue the school system
No. The article states that the school already lost grant funding because an organization didn't like what they were doing. I'd also be willing to bet the school is doing this due to lack of funding to begin with. Taking even more of their funding away would not help anything.
I respectfully disagree. The ability to sue public institutions -- schools, police departments, cities, etc. -- when they do wrong is key to accountability. It is never the preferred way, but sometimes it's a legitimate last resort.
I also would not characterize it as taking your own money away from students. If a man was going to buy his daughter an expensive birthday present, but he drives drunk and crashes into my house, I might sue him, and he might have to give me the money he was planning to use to buy the present. But have I deprived the girl of her present, or has he? In the same way, it is the public institutions, and their leaders, who are at fault if they conduct themselves in a way that leads to legal liabilities, not the victims who sue. The students who are deprived of resources as a result of those legal liabilities should blame the school administration, not the victims.
So I don't understand how the school system is giving the police direct access to a student's grades? Seems unlawful.
> 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 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.
> One former deputy described the directive like this: “Make their lives miserable until they move or sue.”
> In just five years, Nocco’s signature program has ensnared almost 1,000 people.
Maybe I am too optimistic?
Replace chickens with guns or immigrants.
State/Local enforcement of those sets of laws is already a highly contentious issue.
Source: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/01/lapd-falsely-labelin...
Context from the article (I haven't dug into the sources), but if the kid was already charged (and after 5-months presumably sentenced) then this is way beyond what should be expected. And showing up at the parent's place of work could result in them losing their job which would be a net-negative for the family and the kid in question. It creates a downward spiral from deliberate police harassment. Which fits with the police's stated goal:
> As one former deputy described the program to reporters, the objective was to “make their lives miserable until they move or sue.”
Also I find the idea that the perpetrator's family may face "net-negative" consequences to lack empathy with the victim. Their family may have faced net-negative consequences from the absence of the bicycle. There's an entire famous film about this!
They have the self control to break into homes, to steal. But they don't have the self control to follow rules and live in a society hundreds of millions thrive in? I have zero sympathy. I know how truly awful people are. And they are everywhere because rich lawyers found a loophole, preying on people's naivete and conflict avoidance.
You can write all the news articles you want. You can sign all the legislation you want. The law is here to limit violence, not do what everyone agrees on, not to make everyone feel good. If the police don't do it, other people will. Business owners. Realtors. Other criminals. Foreign debt holders. Or even worse, nature, as in starvation, disease, exposure, trauma from accidents.
It's not okay to be a victim. If you are robbed or attacked, it's not okay. Best way to end crime. Got your window broken, or your city burnt, or your border is opened? I'm not going to punish them anymore. I'm going to punish you.
Watch crime drop real fast after that one.