Bad idea

The Minneapolis City Council voted 6-6 to reject a no-cost 75-day drones-as-first-responder pilot with Skydio, Inc. Council Vice President Jamal Osman, a co-sponsor, cast the deciding no vote after learning Skydio supplies equipment to the Israeli military and assists the Department of Homeland Security on immigration enforcement and surveillance. The pilot would have stationed drones at Minneapolis Fire Station 14 to stream video to 911 dispatchers and police officers. Osman said Skydio works with ICE, which he said terrorized his community, and with a genocidal military government. Supporters said the drones could improve public safety.

On March 10, 2023, the city of Shreveport disclosed that its Real Time Crime Center cameras do not comply with state and federal law because they are insecure and vulnerable to hacking. Mayor Tom Arceneaux said on KEEL radio, “I don’t think they are useful for anything because they are capable of being hacked into. We will probably eat them or sell them for scrap.” Sources estimated between 50 and 90 cameras were installed under former Mayor Adrian Perkins’ administration. The system must be replaced, and city administrators were warned of the noncompliance before purchase.

The Chicago Police Department decommissioned its ‘party to violence’ risk-model program — the Strategic Subject List and its successor, the Crime and Victimization Risk Model — on November 1, 2019, after telling the Office of Inspector General in August 2019 it intended to do so. On January 23, 2020 the OIG published an advisory reporting that CPD had received $3.8 million in federal grants and spent ten years developing the sequential models, which assigned scores predicting the likelihood a person would be the victim or offender in a shooting. The advisory’s areas of concern included the unreliability of risk scores and tiers, improperly trained sworn personnel, a lack of controls on internal and external access, and interventions that may have attached negative consequences to arrests that never produced convictions. The algorithm was built by the Illinois Institute of Technology under a Department of Justice Bureau of Justice Assistance grant. The databases held data on more than 300,000 people.

On March 8, 2019 the LAPD Office of the Inspector General released an audit of the department’s data-driven policing programs — PredPol, Operation LASER and the ELUCD survey platform — and presented it to the Police Commission on March 12. The audit found significant inconsistencies in how individuals were selected and retained in LASER’s chronic-offender program, found the programs lacked oversight and often strayed from stated goals, and concluded there was insufficient data to determine whether PredPol reduced crime; the department had used PredPol for roughly eight years. LAPD suspended its Chronic Offender program and database in August 2018 without announcing it. A memo dated April 15, 2020 said the department would discontinue PredPol immediately, citing the pandemic-driven freeze on new contracts.