Chicago Police Refuse To Reveal “Heat List” Pre-Crime Surveillance Tactics – Journalists Sue
By Nicholas West
ActivistPost.com
JUNE 12, 2017
The Chicago police department continues to march toward what it calls “policing in the 21st century.” If their conduct is any indication, that police work would include systemic corruption, unlawful detention, torture, racial profiling and mass surveillance.
However, activists and journalists continue to work hard to expose even more abuses that might still lurk in the shadows. Some progress has been made. Derrick Broze reported in January of last year about Chicago activist, Freddy Martinez, who filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request with the CPD in 2014. Martinez was seeking details regarding the much-maligned use of Stingray cell phone surveillance. Despite the Chicago PD refusing to answer the request, a Cook County, Illinois judge ordered the Chicago Police Department to allow her to review documents related to cell phone surveillance tools. This case is illustrative of the pressure that needs to be exerted if we are to get answers about what our public servants are truly doing on our behalf.
But Stingray surveillance is merely one component of a much larger surveillance network that Chicago has set up and continues to expand, which even includes an explicit mission to embrace “predictive policing” — essentially, the concept of pre-crime that most people hoped was relegated purely to science fiction.
In late 2013 the public was alerted to an index of approximately 400 people who had been identified by a computer algorithm as being future threats to commit violent crime. Without having actually committed a crime, some of those on the list were being visited by Chicago police warning them that they were already being watched. This index came to be known as the “Heat List.”
When the Chicago Police Department sent one of its commanders to Robert McDaniel’s home last summer, the 22-year-old high school dropout was surprised. Though he lived in a neighborhood well-known for bloodshed on its streets, he hadn’t committed a crime or interacted with a police officer recently. And he didn’t have a violent criminal record, nor any gun violations. In August, he incredulously told the Chicago Tribune, “I haven’t done nothing that the next kid growing up hadn’t done.” Yet, there stood the female police commander at his front door with a stern message: if you commit any crimes, there will be major consequences. We’re watching you.
The Rest…HERE
