"In May and June 2013, when New Orleans’ murder rate was the
sixth-highest in the United States, the Orleans Parish district attorney handed
down two landmark racketeering indictments against dozens of men accused of membership
in two violent Central City drug trafficking gangs, 3NG and the 110ers….
Subsequent investigations by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco,
Firearms and Explosives, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and local
agencies produced further RICO indictments…
According to Ronal Serpas, the department’s chief at the
time, one of the tools used by the New Orleans Police Department to identify
members of gangs like 3NG and the 39ers came from the Silicon Valley company
Palantir. The company provided software to a secretive NOPD program that traced
people’s ties to other gang members, outlined criminal histories, analyzed
social media, and predicted the likelihood that individuals would commit
violence or become a victim. As part of the discovery process in Lewis’ trial,
the government turned over more than 60,000 pages of documents detailing
evidence gathered against him from confidential informants, ballistics, and
other sources — but they made no mention of the NOPD’s partnership with
Palantir, according to a source familiar with the 39ers trial.
Predictive policing technology has proven highly
controversial wherever it is implemented, but in New Orleans, the program
escaped public notice, partly because Palantir established it as a
philanthropic relationship with the city through Mayor Mitch Landrieu’s
signature NOLA For Life program. Thanks to its philanthropic status, as well as
New Orleans’ ‘strong mayor’ model of government, the agreement never passed
through a public procurement process….
Even within the law enforcement community, there are
concerns about the potential civil liberties implications of the sort of
individualized prediction Palantir developed in New Orleans, and whether it’s
appropriate for the American criminal justice system.
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