A sheriff’s office outside of Tampa, Florida, maintains a secret list of children who are considered at risk of “developing into prolific offenders” and relies on statistics including grades and whether the child has been abused or has witnessed domestic abuse.
The list was uncovered in an investigative report from the Tampa Bay Times and can only be accessed by a juvenile intelligence analyst and school resource officers. Children and their parents have no way of knowing whether they are one of the 420 children on the list.
Pasco schools superintendent Kurt Browning and two high school principals said they were unaware that such a list existed. Law enforcement experts told the Tampa Bay Times that sifting through student education and child-welfare records for such purposes was “highly unusual” and a “clear misuse of children’s confidential information that stretched the limits of the law.”
A spokesperson for the Pasco Sheriff’s Office said the list is not meant to target students as potential criminals.
“The ‘at risk’ list … is not a list of those who may become prolific offenders, but rather a list of those that may be at risk for truancy, mental health issues, victimization, self-harm, substance abuse or crime,” the spokesperson said, adding that those adverse childhood experiences are “academically proven to lead to the possibility of increased victimization, mental health concerns and other aspects … including criminal activity.”
The spokesperson said the sheriff’s office is disappointed “that the Tampa Bay Times chose to spin a tale of fiction regarding the work of our School Resource Officers.”
However, the intelligence manual paints a less nuanced picture. “Identifying at-risk youth who are destined to a life of crime and engaging them to prevent them from developing into prolific offenders also has a significant crime prevention potential,” the report reads. “The Pasco Sheriff’s Office has partnered with the Pasco County School Board and Department of Children and Families (through our CPI Division) to identify juveniles who are at-risk of becoming prolific offenders.”
The 89-page manual does not reference addressing those other risks. The term “self-harm” does not appear in the manual at all, and the others are not used with regard to being prevented among at-risk students.
Former deputies said the middle and high school students on the list are targeted even if there is no evidence to suggest they’ve committed a crime. They said they were “ordered to harass people on the target list by visiting their homes repeatedly and looking for reasons to write tickets and make arrests.”
Browning said he was not concerned by the existence of the list or how the sheriff’s office was using student data but added that “if there is any need to revisit any aspect of our relationship, we will do so in a thoughtful manner with the goal of keeping our students and staff safe.”
Critics of the list said it relied on “flawed science” and added that it likely was biased against children of color and children with disabilities. According to federal data, black children and children with disabilities are more than twice as likely to be suspended or referred to police for behavior that white children would receive lesser discipline for participating in.
Bacardi Jackson, a senior supervising attorney for children’s rights who works for the Southern Poverty Law Center, said using lists like the Pasco Sheriff’s Office’s creates a “circular effect” — children on the list are subject to heavier scrutiny and face increased discipline for minor offenses, which is reincorporated into the list’s metrics and increases their risk level, which leads to even more scrutiny, and so on.
