New Orleans' Secret Predictive Policing Software Challenged In Court

Legal Issues

from the you-might-be-a-gang-member-if... dept

Predictive policing software — developed by Palantir and deployed secretly by the New Orleans Police Department for nearly six years — is at the center of a criminal prosecution. The Verge first reported the NOPD’s secret use of Palantir’s software a few weeks ago, something only the department and the mayor knew anything about.

The relationship between New Orleans and Palantir was finalized on February 23rd, 2012, when Mayor Landrieu signed an agreement granting New Orleans free access to the firm’s public sector data integration platform. Licenses and tech support for Palantir’s law enforcement platform can run to millions of dollars annually, according to an audit of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department.

In January 2013, New Orleans would also allow Palantir to use its law enforcement account for LexisNexis’ Accurint product, which is comprised of millions of searchable public records, court filings, licenses, addresses, phone numbers, and social media data. The firm also got free access to city criminal and non-criminal data in order to train its software for crime forecasting. Neither the residents of New Orleans nor key city council members whose job it is to oversee the use of municipal data were aware of Palantir’s access to reams of their data.

Suspects being tried didn’t know anything about it either. While the NOPD turned over 60,000 pages of documents to Evans “Easy” Lewis during his trial for conspiracy and murder charges, not a single one of them referenced the software the police were using to sniff out suspects. This was mainly due to Palantir giving the city the software for free, which allowed both the city and the PD to cut the public out of the equation by eliminating bidding processes and budgetary reporting requirements.

The mayor ended the program two weeks after the Verge report, choosing not to continue working with the contractor. It appears this decision was made to limit negative coverage of the secret software deployment, rather than out of any concern for the millions of New Orleans residents swept up in Palantir’s dragnet.

Yesterday, outgoing New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu’s press office told the Times-Picayune that his office would not renew its pro bono contract with Palantir, which has been extended three times since 2012. The remarks were the first from Landrieu’s office concerning Palantir’s work with the NOPD. The mayor did not respond to repeated requests for comment from The Verge for the February 28th article, done in partnership with Investigative Fund, or from local media since news of the partnership broke.

Now that the city’s secret is no longer secret, defense attorneys are demanding the NOPD start handing over Palantir-generated evidence. A man challenging his conviction on gang-related charges in New Orleans is asking for everything Palantir has on him, under the theory the dragnet also swept up plenty of exculpatory info.

In the first courtroom challenge to the New Orleans Police Department’s use of sophisticated crime-fighting software, a judge on Wednesday granted a convicted Central City gang lord a chance to try to prove his allegation that a Palantir Technologies program spat out exculpatory information on him that was never revealed to his attorneys.

Criminal District Court Judge Camille Buras set an April 3 court date to rule on subpoenas that attorneys for Kentrell “Black” Hickerson will be seeking in order to learn how Palantir’s program, called “Gotham,” has been used in New Orleans — and particularly in the case against Hickerson and 19 other suspected “3NG” gang members.

Buras said that Hickerson’s lead attorney, Kevin Vogeltanz, could add the argument to Hickerson’s pending motion for a new trial.

Prosecutors are arguing the Palantir documents will add nothing new. They claim the only thing the software does is aggregate info from multiple law enforcement databases to make it easier to search. But that’s not how the software is described in the Verge report. It’s predictive policing software — something that turns people into suspects based on their relationships with people in law enforcement databases or their location in the city. That’s far more than “aggregation.” It creates criminals who haven’t committed crimes and encourages officers to view certain areas of the city as inherently suspicious.

This dovetails directly into the defense’s theory about Palantir’s attenuated associations and quasi-geofencing of suspected gang members: what Palantir “sees” isn’t necessarily what’s actually happening.

Hickerson, 38, was convicted of racketeering and drug conspiracy counts after a 10-day trial in Buras’ courtroom two years ago. Prosecutors and former gang allies said he committed or directed a series of killings in a battle over turf rights around Third and Galvez streets.

At the trial and afterward, however, Vogeltanz argued that authorities had created the idea that 3NG was a gang. He pointed to testimony from a key cooperating witness, Tyrone Knockum, who cast doubt on the gang’s cohesiveness.

“Is it a bona fide gang, or is it a group of people that grew up around each other and hang around with each other?” Vogeltanz asked.

“It’s a group of people that grew up around each other,” Knockum said.

That’s what happens when algorithms decide people in the general vicinity of each other must all engage in the same activities. If some of them engage in criminal activities, then everyone the software declares to be risky — based on law enforcement databases and math companies aren’t willing to share with the accused — faces the possibility of being swept up and charged with conspiracy, if nothing else. And criminal conspiracy charges result in real years in real prisons, based on little more than calculated assumptions about a person’s relationship to those around them.

Filed Under: new orleans, nopd, police, surveillance
Companies: palantir