New Orleans Police Have Been Secretly Predicting Crimes Before They Happen

Once upon a time, predictive policing systems (akin to the one seen in 2002 film Minority Report) were thoroughly fictional. Those days might very well be over.

According to an investigative report by The Verge, CIA-funded data-mining firm Palantir Technologies has deployed a proprietary predictive policing system in New Orleans since at least 2012.

The New Orleans Police Department (NOPD) has secretively used the tool to identify members of local gangs — and even predict the likelihood that they would commit or become a victim of gang violence.

Such platforms have been controversial elsewhere, but Palantir’s system has largely escaped notice in New Orleans — to the point that key city council members had no idea that the NOPD had been using the predictive policing tool, or that Palantir used the partnership with the NOPD to “market” its system to another law enforcement agency.

“No one in New Orleans even knows about this, to my knowledge,” political consultant James Carville told The Verge. Carville had been instrumental in setting up the cooperation between Palantir and the NOPD.

To predict crime, the Palantir-developed tool parses and analyses a wealth of data — from gang member ties and criminal histories to social media posts. And in 2013, New Orleans gave the shadowy firm law enforcement-level access to a database of public records, licenses, court filings, addresses and phone numbers, according to The Verge.

Palantir Technologies was founded in 2004 by PayPal cofounder Peter Thiel, Alex Karp and Joe Lonsdale, according to The Intercept. And its association with government entities stretches back to its inception — the Silicon Valley company was funded by the venture capital arm of the CIA.

While the firm has declined to name or even discuss its government contracts, it has landed at least “$1.2 billion” in federal contracts since 2009, The Intercept reported. In addition to law enforcement agencies around the country, Palantir has marketed and sold its predictive policing system to foreign governments, as well.

Predictive policing systems such as Palantir’s have come under fire for their potential threat to privacy rights and their other potential consequences.

In 2016, the American Civil Liberties Union and 16 other civil rights and technology organizations issued a joint “statement of concern” about predictive policing technologies and some of the related issues, including lack of transparency and proliferation of racial profiling.