Pasco Sheriff Chris Nocco took over in 2011 and set out to transform the Sheriff’s Office into a cutting-edge data-driven machine. The result is an intelligence operation that monitors, intimidates and harasses families across the county. Read the investigation Pasco’s sheriff uses data to guess who will commit crime. Then deputies ‘hunt down’ and harass them.
Sept. 3, 2020 Interactive: How a Florida Sheriff harasses families. Watch the body-cam video
Sept. 3, 2020 Pasco’s sheriff uses grades and abuse histories to secretly label schoolchildren potential criminals
Nov. 22, 2020 Pasco Sheriff Chris Nocco has a controversial approach — and powerful friends who don’t question it
By KATHLEEN McGRORY and NEIL BEDI Photos by DOUGLAS R. CLIFFORD Times staffSept. 3, 2020
Pasco County Sheriff Chris Nocco took office in 2011 with a bold plan: to create a cutting-edge intelligence program that could stop crime before it happened.
What he actually built was a system to continuously monitor and harass Pasco County residents, a Tampa Bay Times investigation has found.
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.
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.
At least 1 in 10 were younger than 18, the Times found.
Some of the young people were labeled targets despite having only one or two arrests. Rio Wojtecki, 15, was named a “Top 5” offender by the Pasco Sheriff’s Office. DOUGLAS R. CLIFFORD | Times
Rio Wojtecki, 15, became a target in September 2019, almost a year after he was arrested for sneaking into carports with a friend and stealing motorized bicycles.
Those were the only charges against Rio, and he already had a state-issued juvenile probation officer checking on him. Yet from September 2019 to January 2020, Pasco Sheriff’s deputies went to his home at least 21 times, dispatch logs show.
They showed up at the car dealership where his mom worked, looked for him at a friend’s house and checked his gym to see if he had signed in.
More than once, the deputies acknowledged that Rio wasn’t getting into trouble. They mostly grilled him about his friends, according to body-camera video of the interactions. But he had been identified as a target, they said, so they had to keep checking on him.
Since September 2015, the Sheriff’s Office has sent deputies on checks like those more than 12,500 times, dispatch logs show. Body-camera footage shows deputies interacting with people targeted by the intelligence-led policing program. Pasco Sheriff’s Office
[Click to watch body-camera footage of the deputies’ interactions]
Deputies gave the mother of one teenage target a $2,500 fine because she had five chickens in her backyard. They arrested another target’s father after peering through a window in his house and noticing a 17-year-old friend of his son smoking a cigarette.
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.
In Pasco, however, the initiative has expanded. Last summer, the Sheriff’s Office announced plans to begin keeping tabs on people who have been repeatedly committed to psychiatric hospitals. Pasco County Sheriff Chris Nocco Times file
The Times shared its findings with the Sheriff’s Office six weeks before this story published. Nocco declined multiple interview requests.
In statements that spanned more than 30 pages, the agency said it stands behind its program — part of a larger initiative it calls intelligence-led policing. It said other local departments use similar techniques and accused the Times of cherry-picking examples and painting “basic law enforcement functions” as harassment.
[Click to read the Sheriff’s Office response to the Times]
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.
“This reduction in property crime has a direct, positive impact on the lives of the citizens of Pasco County and, for that, we will not apologize,” one of the statements said. “Our first and primary mission is to serve and protect our community and the Intelligence Led Policing philosophy assists us in achieving that mission.”
But Pasco’s drop in property crimes was similar to the decline in the seven-largest nearby police jurisdictions. Over the same time period, violent crime increased only in Pasco.
Additional coverage
¦ Interactive: How a Florida Sheriff harasses families. Watch the body-cam video
¦ Pasco’s sheriff uses grades and abuse histories to secretly label schoolchildren potential criminals
¦ Pasco Sheriff Chris Nocco has a controversial approach — and powerful friends who don’t question it
¦ Public interest groups take aim at Pasco sheriff’s data-driven policing programs
¦ Congressman urges federal probe of Pasco school data program
¦ Lawsuit: Pasco intelligence program violated citizens’ rights
Click here to follow all of the coverage.
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.
“Morally repugnant,” said Matthew Barge, an expert in police practices and civil rights who oversaw court-ordered agreements to address police misconduct in Cleveland and Baltimore.
“One of the worst manifestations of the intersection of junk science and bad policing — and an absolute absence of common sense and humanity — that I have seen in my career," said David Kennedy, a renowned criminologist at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, whose research on crime prevention is referenced in Pasco’s policies.
The Times’ examination of Pasco’s intelligence program comes amid a national debate over the role of police in society and calls to reduce funding for law enforcement or replace entire departments.
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