The program’s failure should serve as an alarm bell in an era where police agencies nationwide increasingly deploy controversial surveillance technology.

A report published on January 23 by the City of Chicago’s Office of the Inspector General (OIG) analyzed the performance of the risk models—known as the Party to Violence (PTV) Program— which the Department officially discontinued on November 1, 2019. Of the 398,684 individuals recorded in one version of the model, only 16.3 percent were confirmed to be members of gangs. One district commander cited in the report who used the system believed, for reasons that are unclear, that the number was 95 percent.

Incorrect data and weak oversight helped to make models unreliable and unethical. People who were arrested but never convicted of a crime remained in the database. Those who were arrested for low-level, nonviolent offenses were also included. Some people who were supposed to have been removed from the program because they hadn’t committed another crime were left in anyway. The training provided to officers on the proper use of the database was minimal. And any Department personnel could access the information—even if their jobs had nothing to do with the program’s stated purpose. 

Why were hundreds of thousands of people assigned a status that subjected them to intensive policing and enhanced punishment?

After the fatal shooting of Nykea Aldridge, a cousin of Chicago Bull and NBA star Dwayne Wade, in August 2016, then-Chicago Police Chief Eddie Johnson said: “The Frustrating part is…we have 1,400 individuals that drive this gun violence in this city. This isn’t a mystery.”

If that was the Department’s belief, then why were hundreds of thousands of people assigned a status that subjected them to intensive policing, and to enhanced punishment if they were convicted of an unrelated crime?

How It Was Supposed to Work

The OIG details how the Department built a Strategic Subject List (SSL) and Crime and Victimization Risk Model (CVRM). Its purpose was to assign risk scores ranging from 10-500 to people entered in the system—and then sort them into tiers to determine who would be most likely to be either the victim or offender in a shooting in the next 18 months. 

The Department has said in the past that people with risk scores above 250 were subject to scrutiny. Those involved in a shooting—including victims—were referred to as “parties to violence.” 

The Department had never released a complete list of the factors used to assign risk scores until this report. Relevant factors, it turns out, included age at latest arrest, arrests for unauthorized use of a weapon, violent incident arrests, trends in involvement in crime incidents, drug arrests and gang affiliation. We still don’t know how much weight was given to each element of the model. 

The goal was to track and monitor the behavior of people in the system over time and assess how they responded to different crime control strategies, providing data to inform future approaches. Beginning in March 2015, CPD included information about whether people had risk scores or not in the narrative section of arrest reports. 

The theory behind the program was very simple: Those with higher risk scores were more likely to become “parties to violence.” Several researchers of urban gun violence have argued that a small and highly concentrated population is responsible for most shootings in a given city, and that identifying and managing those at risk of offending is the key to reducing violence. This “focus on the violence” strategy was popularized by Thomas Abt’s 2019 book Bleeding Out. Chicago’s former Chief Johnson said he hoped that the risk models would allow the Department to better target their policing of violence.

Researchers from the Illinois Institute of Technology built all six versions of the model and generated risk scores and party-to-violence candidates using de-identified data from CPD’s Information Services Division. CPD then reidentified and matched the data to individuals in the system and created a single “dashboard” of all risk profiles, available Department-wide.

Risk scores and tiers were also plugged into Caboodle, the geospatial tool that the Department uses to map criminal activity—which has itself attracted scrutiny because of its use as a visualization tool for the city’s controversial anti-gang databases. 

Racial Disparities in Chicago Policing

Racial disparities in the Chicago Police Department’s practices are stark. The Vera Institute of Justice’s Arrest Trends tool demonstrates that in a population that is 30.1 percent Black, 72.5 percent of all arrests made by the CPD in 2016 were of African Americans. That disparity is higher for violent offenses.

Communities of color in the city felt the brunt of the program’s ill effects.

CPD has stated that race and gender were not determinative factors in the risk models. However, a 2017 Chicago Sun-Times investigation found that 85 percent of those with the highest risk score in the model were African American.

As a result, communities of color in the city felt the brunt of the program’s ill effects. This is true for people whose names should not have been on the Strategic Subject List, and for those who had inflated risk scores and were subject to intensive policing or enhanced enforcement. It’s also true of people who had their privacy violated by having arrest and other personal information exposed to law enforcement personnel who should have never had access to it.

These harms have yet to be quantified. But while we don’t have data to demonstrate specifically how the city’s risk models drove racially biased patterns of enforcement or prosecution, we do know that it was used to contribute to Chicago justice system programs that have been criticized for heightening racial disparities in the past. This is especially true for the role PTV may have played in CPD’s controversial gang policing efforts.

The PTV program could be used as one of 10 potential criteria for admission into the Department’s initiative to identify repeat offenders in gang-involved violent crime: Targeted Repeat-Offender Apprehension and Prosecution (TRAP). The PTV program was also one of four “technical components” of the Department’s Gang Violence Reduction Strategy (GVRS).

Previous OIG reports have documented how Chicago’s gang databases suffered from the same issues as the PTV program, including erroneous admissions, poor data privacy protocols, and racially disparate outcomes—95 percent of people entered in the gang database after an arrest were identified as Black or Hispanic. 

A Critical Conversation

A range of violence reduction strategies, including the formation of community outreach groups from impacted neighborhoods, have paid off for Chicago in recent years: In 2019 the city reported 492 murders, a 35 percent decline from an horrific 2016, when the murder total was higher than it had been in more than two decades. More needs to be done: The homicide rate in Chicago is still above cities like New York and Los Angeles.

But in addition to highlighting the harms of Chicago’s predictive policing program, the OIG’s findings cast serious doubt on whether it had any impact on the recent decline in violence. The federal government gave the CPD a $3.8 million grant to implement its predictive policing program in 2012. This money would surely have been better spent on community investment, or violence reduction strategies that are proven to reduce gun violence.

Given the New York Times’s recent bombshell report that exposed the CPD as one of the agencies making use of invasive new facial recognition software run by the firm Clearview AI, a broader conversation about the CPD’s technology and data practices is critical. 

The city council and the community must lead this charge. To protect Chicagoans, particularly in the city’s most marginalized communities, transparency and democratic accountability are long overdue.

Photo by vxla via Flickr/Creative Commons 2.0

The post The Lessons of Chicago’s Disastrous “Crime Prediction” Experiment appeared first on Filter.

He was not being violent. But 911 dispatchers did not contact the Emergency Services Unit (ESU) that is trained to handle situations involving people in a mental health crisis. Four NYPD patrol officers showed up instead, and after he moved towards them with a bread knife, one Tased him. When he continued his approach, the one officer not trained in crisis intervention shot him dead.

People like Dwayne Jeune who are suffering from a mental health crisis are often arrested or subject to force when the police are called to manage these incidents. Now, new data sheds light on how frequently Tasers, which the NYPD has increasingly turned to in its everyday enforcement patterns, are used to subdue mentally ill New Yorkers.

The department’s deployment of Tasers has exploded in recent years.

Last month, the Civilian Complaint Review Board (CCRB), the city agency tasked with oversight of the NYPD, released a report revealing that the majority of police misconduct complaints concerning Taser use came from people suffering from a mental health crisis during the incident.

The CCRB found that 52 percent of such complaints from 2014-2017 involved either an individual deemed an “emotionally disturbed person (EDP)” by the police or someone showing signs of crisis—a number that rose as high as 67 percent in 2016. In 2017, 31 percent of the NYPD’s total Taser discharges involved an “EDP.”

The department’s deployment of Tasers has exploded in recent years. While the devices were once only issued to supervising officers, the NYPD has now provided a Taser to every one of its patrol vehicles. There are currently at least 3,000 Tasers in the field—up from 1,710 in 2016.

With 72 percent of Taser complaints also coming from people of color, and the vast majority from young men, we now have proof that the same communities that have historically felt the brunt of the NYPD’s enforcement power are disproportionately involved in the growing number of Taser incidents in the city.

Another disturbing finding was that in most incidents involving a person in crisis, the responding officer had been informed of the individual’s mental health status before arriving on the scene, most often from a 911 call. Yet many of these cases could not be de-escalated or resolved without the use of force. 

The CCRB’s analysis highlights how the NYPD’s vague use of force guidelines, the city’s dysfunctional 911 dispatching system, and a lack of robust alternatives to enforcement all contribute to negative outcomes for people in crisis. Instead of treatment for mental health or substance use disorders, their anguish is too often met with handcuffs or worse.  

About 25 percent of the time officers used a Taser, its discharge was “unintentional.”

The CCRB reviewed 114 complaints by civilians between the years 2014 and 2017. Previously, the agency has found that police officers who discharge Tasers frequently do so in situations involving people who are unarmed or have already been detained—not individuals who pose a serious threat to the officer or someone else. Shortly before the CCRB published its analysis of Taser complaints, the NYPD came out with a use of force review that contained its own shocking finding: About 25 percent of the time police officers used a Taser, its discharge was “unintentional.”

The CCRB report comes in the wake of new reforms that will soon see the NYPD pilot a “co-response” model for 911 calls involving people in crisis. Since 2016, the city’s mental health initiative, ThriveNYC, has also experimented with co-response teams that partner patrol officers with mental health workers. But the units have never been widely used or properly synced with 911 dispatching systems, and have played an extremely limited role in the city’s approach to affected populations. 

911 calls involving a person in crisis have nearly doubled in the last decade, but a city investigation found that only 21 percent of patrol officers had received crisis intervention training as of January 2017. The NYPD said it would take until at least 2023 before all officers are trained on proper techniques for responding to people in crisis.

The outcomes for individuals in crisis are as predictable as they are distressing: 56 percent of 911 calls involving someone with a mental illness lead to ER visits; police officers are present in 75 percent of these hospital transports; and 43 percent of people incarcerated on Rikers Island are mentally ill.

The CCRB investigation also found a conflict between the NYPD’s training on appropriate Taser use for executives and the guidance it provides to its own patrol officers on Crisis Intervention Teams (CITs). Executives are taught that tasing mentally ill civilians is often the most effective response in order to make a quick arrest, especially in cases where they are running away from the scene.

The CCRB recommended that the NYPD patrol guide and associated trainings better define when it is appropriate to use Tasers in “drive stun mode” (which causes more pain than other Taser settings in the process of subduing a suspect). NYPD trainings do not include examples of when using a Taser on that setting is considered excessive force—and also do not define the “exceptional circumstances” that the NYPD patrol guide deems acceptable for using a Taser in drive stun mode.

One limitation of the report concerns the difficulties the agency has had with obtaining Taser data logs from the NYPD—a process that the authors said “has been long and arduous enough to discourage CCRB investigators from requesting the data logs in the first place.”

Cases like Jeune’s illustrate how breakdowns at multiple levels of the city’s response to people in crisis can cascade into tragedy. First, 911 dispatching services failed to appropriately triage the call; then an officer who was not trained in crisis intervention was sent to the scene; and finally, the CIT-instructed officers did not take the lead in de-escalating the incident. Instead, the officers Tased Jeune and then used lethal force.

Jeune had no history of violent behavior and the 911 call that came in from his own mother was a request for respondents who would approach him like someone in need of treatment, rather than as a dangerous threat.

Axon, the company that sells Tasers to law enforcement, has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars lobbying the city.

Back in 2006, the NYPD had just 160 active Tasers in service. But department officials have spoken enthusiastically about expanding the use of Tasers; and Axon, the company that sells Tasers to law enforcement agencies, has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars lobbying the city. Tasers’ deployment is only likely to grow as an alternative to more lethal weaponry. NYPD officers discharged a Taser 45 percent more often in 2017 than in the previous year.

The CCRB has proposed more thorough officer training, clearer use of force guidance, transparent data collection processes, and the automatic recording of incidents by body worn cameras. These reforms may encourage more responsible Taser deployment and reduce its use as a response to people in crisis. However, they are unlikely to bring the kind of radical change the city needs to productively respond to incidents involving mentally ill people.

Consider another finding in the report: that in 57 percent of Taser discharges, the responding officer did not adequately warn a civilian before using a Taser, despite being trained to do so. Police officers are used to using force as a response to disorderly or disturbing behavior, and robust guidelines for police will not resolve the fundamental issue: that law enforcement is often not the institution best suited to respond to people in crisis.

New York city should embrace solutions beyond what the CCRB recommends in its report. For example, the city’s public advocate, Jumaane Williams, has called for the creation of a non-police phone number that can serve as an alternative for people to call for crisis response and increased funding for mental health urgent care centers. Cities such as Eugene, Oregon have installed innovative programs that connect mental health teams to 911 systems, involving no police response at all. 

As the NYPD continues to shift its enforcement priorities towards the use of Tasers as an alternative to firearms, the city must adapt its social policy to ensure that people in crisis and other marginalized communities are protected.

Photo by Corey Ryan Hanson via Pixabay.

The post The Disturbing Prevalence of NYPD Taser Use on Mentally Ill New Yorkers appeared first on Filter.