Pasco County Sheriff Will End Predictive Policing Program to Settle Lawsuit Over Harassment

The Pasco County Sheriff’s Office is permanently scuttling a predictive policing program that was the subject of critical media investigations and a pending civil rights lawsuit alleging the program amounted to frequent unconstitutional harassment of families.

In a settlement agreement ending that civil rights lawsuit, the Pasco County Sheriff’s Office acknowledged that its “Intelligence Led Policing” (ILP) program exceeded officers’ implied license to knock on doors and perform offender checks, interfering with the plaintiffs’ First, Fourth, and Fourteenth Amendment rights.

One of those plaintiffs, Darlene Deegan, was harassed for three years by Pasco sheriff’s deputies after her opioid-addicted son was flagged by the program. This included repeated, day-after-day visits to her house by police, demanding to know where her son was, and accruing $3,000 in fines for petty code violations, allegedly in retaliation for her refusal to cooperate.

“For years, the Pasco Sheriff’s Office treated me like it could do anything it wanted,” Deegan said in a press release issued by the Institute for Justice, a public interest law firm that represented her and several other county residents. “But today proves that when ordinary people stand up for themselves, the Constitution still means what it says.”

The Institute for Justice filed a federal civil rights lawsuit in 2021 on behalf of Deegan and three other Pasco County residents who claimed the harassment violated their constitutional rights.

In addition to ending the ILP program and agreeing not to create a similar one, the Pasco County Sheriff’s Office will pay $105,000 to the four plaintiffs in the lawsuit.

A 2020 Tampa Bay Times investigation first revealed how the ILP program used algorithms to flag “prolific offenders” that

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