TAMPA — A federal judge isn’t convinced that the Pasco County Sheriff’s Office has stopped targeting people it considers likely to commit future crimes, or that the practice won’t resume in the future.
U.S. Magistrate Judge Christopher Tuite issued a 96-page report this week in a federal lawsuit over the sheriff’s controversial intelligence-led policing program, which was brought by several Pasco County residents who said they were subjected to monitoring and harassment by sheriff’s deputies.
The report features a complex legal analysis of claims raised in the lawsuit, with recommendations that a district judge should reject some claims, while others are best left for trial. One such issue in dispute is whether the controversial policing program has indeed ended, or if it continues under another name.
The plaintiffs alleged that their constitutional rights were violated after they became targets of the sheriff’s “prolific offender” program. The sheriff’s office had argued that claims in the lawsuit were moot because the agency had already phased out its “prolific offender checks.” Instead, the agency now focuses on people reasonably suspected of having committed a particular crime under investigation, a designation known as “focused offenders.”
But the judge found that Sheriff Chris Nocco had not shown “unambiguously” that he has ended the program or made clear that his agency’s alleged wrongful behavior would not recur.
“Nocco has not acknowledged any wrongdoing in instituting the (intelligence-led policing) program, has never promised not to resume the program, and, in fact, maintains … that the program was entirely lawful,” Tuite wrote.
At the same time, the judge denied claims that sheriff’s deputies needed reasonable suspicion of a crime to approach people’s homes and conduct a “knock and talk,” or that the prolific offender checks constituted a warrantless search. The judge found there was nothing inherently improper about knocking on people’s doors to ask about criminal activity.
The Pasco sheriff’s office said in a statement that they were aware of the judge’s report, noting that several of his recommendations favored their side.
“We will continue to defend these allegations in the appropriate venue as protecting our citizens is paramount,” the statement read.
The agency’s intelligence-led policing program, which involved frequent home visits to people considered to be at risk of committing future crimes, was the subject of a 2020 Tampa Bay Times investigation, which won the Pulitzer Prize. The program used a computer algorithm to build a list of people who became subject to monitoring and harassment by sheriff’s deputies, the Times found. Some targets were minors. Experts compared the tactics to child abuse, mafia harassment and authoritarian surveillance.
The sheriff’s office claimed that the program helped reduce property crimes, though other nearby jurisdictions saw a similar decline in property crimes without using the same tactics.
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Explore all your optionsOnce the sheriff’s office identified someone as a “prolific offender,” deputies conducted frequent checks on them. A program manual, referenced in the judge’s report, instructed deputies to communicate with the targeted people that they had two options: stop committing crimes and become a productive member of society, or “bear the consequences of their criminal ways through relentless pursuit, arrest and prosecution.”
There were no limits on how often deputies could conduct offender checks or any requirement for deputies to have probable cause or reasonable suspicion that a crime had occurred. Deputies visited 255 addresses at least 10 times and 30 addresses at least 30 times, according to the court record. Visits occurred at all hours. Deputies would ask targets about whether they were in school or had a job, who they hung out with or dated. Parents would be asked about their children.
The court record bears numerous examples of alleged harassment and heavy-handed tactics deputies employed to go after people on the list.
In one incident described in court records, deputies arrested a man and spoke with him about “parenting issues.” They warned him of an aggressive law enforcement response if he didn’t better control his child.
“And we’ll just continue on this s--t, because you’re messing around with an aggressive sheriff,” one deputy said, according to court records. “Sheriff Nocco is not playing games and that’s the bottom line.”
In another incident, a deputy visiting a woman on the list called child protective services, court records state. He later admitted that child protective services was unlikely to act on his report but that he was “doing it as a big f--k you” to her.
Deputies were said to have used code enforcement as a means of harassing people. In some cases, neighbors of the targeted people had the same code violations but were not cited for them, according to the court record. In one case, a corporal in charge of code enforcement wrote in a performance evaluation that one of his most significant accomplishments was the issuance of so many code citations to a prolific offender’s mother that she was evicted from her home.
The lawsuit was filed in 2021. The next year, the sheriff’s office discontinued using the “prolific offender” designation, stopped requiring quarterly prolific offender checks, and ended a “zero tolerance” policy for arrests and code violations involving prolific offenders, according to court records.
At the same time, though, the agency still has a program directed at “focused offenders,” which are those who have “demonstrated a pattern of criminal behavior” and are currently “affecting the crime environment.” Similar checks are permitted under the new program, though they’re not required.
The judge noted sharp declines in prolific offender checks around the time the lawsuit was filed.
Three of the lawsuit plaintiffs have said that although their children are no longer deemed prolific offenders or focused offenders, they still receive visits from deputies that are “akin to the prolific offender checks,” the court record states.
The judge noted that one of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit, Tammy Heilman, received a visit from deputies in April 2023. The deputies asked questions about her son. They claimed it was a “probation check,” according to the court record, though her son was not on probation.
The judge’s report was submitted with recommendations to a federal district judge for an official ruling.
