OPINION · FMNN INVESTIGATES: FLORIDA
For years, Pasco's sheriff scored schoolchildren on their grades, attendance and abuse histories, and sent deputies to the doors of people he expected to commit crimes. His office has admitted those home visits violated people's constitutional rights. Now he's a state senator.
Opinion by Joseph J. Jackson | PASCO COUNTY (Nov. 11, 2026)
The short version
In December 2024, the Pasco Sheriff's Office settled a federal lawsuit for $105,000. In the agreement it accepted that its "prolific offender" checks violated the plaintiffs' First, Fourth and Fourteenth Amendment rights, and promised the program would never return.
Its own 2018 manual described a list of schoolchildren meant to identify youth "destined to a life of crime." A civil-rights group's review of the records counted 10,000 to more than 17,000 students on it from 2019 to 2021.
The office refused to release the list's records. In May 2025 an appeals court said it had "no legal basis" to withhold them.
The man who ran that office, Chris Nocco, won Senate District 21 on Nov. 3. His second-in-command for the whole program, Jeff Harrington, is Pasco's new sheriff.
What the sheriff built
Chris Nocco became Pasco's sheriff in 2011, appointed by Gov. Rick Scott. He brought a program he called Intelligence-Led Policing. Its centerpiece was a list of "prolific offenders," people the office scored on arrests and "suspicions," and then visited, again and again, without warrants.
Plaintiffs' court filings counted more than 13,000 of those checks over six years. The Tampa Bay Times, in the series that won the 2021 Pulitzer Prize for local reporting, counted more than 12,500. Deputies cited families for tall grass, missing house numbers and unvaccinated pets. Times reporting documented one 15-year-old's family contacted 21 times in four months.
The office's own words, pulled from records in the lawsuit by the Institute for Justice, describe the goal plainly. A deputy wrote in an email that "the goal is to get them to move away or go to prison." On body-camera video, a deputy says they will "keep on harassing them, every single day."
Then it went into the schools
The second list is the one every parent in Pasco should read about.
The office's 2018 manual said it was "identifying at-risk youth who are destined to a life of crime." According to the manual, the office took "the active rosters of each school in the county" and matched each student to the school district's early warning data. Children were scored and placed in bands: "On Track," "At Risk," "Off-Track" or "Critical."
The inputs were things no child chooses on the way to becoming a criminal. A grade-point average below 2.5. A single D. Three absences in a quarter. One discipline referral. And records from the Department of Children and Families: whether the child had been abused, had seen violence at home, or lived through a custody fight.
The NAACP Legal Defense Fund reviewed the records and reported in December 2024 that between 10,000 and more than 17,000 students were on the list from 2019 to 2021. Its report said 300 to 500 a year were flagged for closer monitoring, that the January 2020 list included three kindergartners, and that police made at least 219 contacts with listed students in four months of 2018.
The office said publicly that the list was about "support" and "mentorship," and that it narrowed some 20,000 flagged students to about 330. Its manual told school resource officers to collect information on students and plan home visits "to engage parents and identify additional risk factors for offending."
The admission
In December 2024, the Sheriff's Office settled the federal lawsuit brought by four residents. It paid $105,000, covered by the Florida Sheriffs Association's risk fund. It agreed the program had ended and would "never resume."
And it agreed, in writing, that the checks "exceeded [the] implied license" to knock on doors under the Fourth Amendment, "directly and substantially interfered with the Plaintiffs' right of intimate association" under the First, and "interfered with Plaintiffs' liberty interests" under the Fourteenth. A federal court keeps the power to enforce it.
To be precise: those are admissions made in a settlement, not a verdict, and the agreement uses the standard no-liability form. But they're the office's own words, signed. The same day, the office said it "will never apologize for keeping our community safe" and called the $105,000 "strictly a financial decision."
The records it wouldn't release
Civil-rights groups asked for the records behind the school list, including what share of the children were Black, Hispanic or disabled. The office refused.
In May 2025, Florida's Second District Court of Appeal ruled the office had "no legal basis" to withhold the records, including de-identified demographic data on the list. The court noted the office "refused to provide any of the requested records, redacted or otherwise," and ordered it to pay the Council on American-Islamic Relations' legal fees. The office said the case had "nothing to do with the substance of intelligence-led policing."
To this day, no racial breakdown of that list has been published. FMNN has asked for it.
What they were warned about
I want to be careful here, because this is where the record stops short of what some critics claim.
There's no document showing the Sheriff's Office set out to target Black or disabled children. What the record does show is that the inputs it chose already ran unequal in Pasco. Federal civil-rights data showed Black students were about 7% of the district's enrollment but 23% of expulsions. ProPublica's analysis of federal data found Black students in Pasco were 2.5 times as likely as white students to be suspended. Those discipline referrals fed the score.
And they were told. In January 2021, Rep. Bobby Scott wrote that "pre-criminal categorization" deepens the school-to-prison pipeline. In May 2021, a coalition including the Legal Defense Fund, the Southern Poverty Law Center, ACLU Greater Tampa, the Pasco NAACP and Disability Rights Florida sent the superintendent an 11-page letter warning that "biased inputs lead to biased outcomes" under federal civil-rights law. That month the school board voted unanimously to cut school resource officers' access to grades, attendance and discipline records.
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The office kept the demographic data secret for four more years, until a court made it stop.
Now he writes the laws
On Nov. 3, Pasco and Pinellas voters sent Nocco to the Florida Senate in District 21. His campaign talked about transportation, internet crime and mental health. FMNN found no campaign statement from him about the program.
He did talk about money. Campaigning for the seat, he said Amendment 3 wouldn't hurt police funding because legislators would make it a "priority," Florida Politics reported. Pasco voted 67.1% for the amendment, and Florida TaxWatch estimates Pasco's local governments will lose about $1.43 billion over five years.
His chief deputy for roughly 12 years, the entire life of the program, was Jeff Harrington. Gov. DeSantis made Harrington sheriff this month. Harrington has said he and Nocco are "just about in lockstep." FMNN found no public statement from Harrington on the program and no record of his role in it. That's one of the questions we've asked.
Their side
Nocco has defended the program as focused on the "6 percent of the population [who] commit 60 percent of the crime," and credited it with a 74.4% drop in residential burglaries. "ILP is not a futuristic, predictive model where people are arrested for crimes they have not yet committed," he said in 2021. The office has said it "never" engaged in predictive policing, and has called its critics an "activist group from outside our community."
The Times' own analysis found Pasco's property-crime decline was similar to the drops in the seven largest nearby jurisdictions, while violent crime rose only in Pasco.
My take
A sheriff ran a program his own office has now admitted, in a signed agreement, violated the rights of the people it targeted. He scored children on their report cards and their abuse histories. When civil-rights groups asked who those children were, he kept it secret until a court ordered otherwise. He never apologized. He said he never would.
Florida voters had every right to send him to Tallahassee. Florida residents have every right to watch what he does there.
Here's what FMNN will be watching. Whether Sen. Nocco supports any limit on data-driven policing or on police access to student records. Whether he keeps his promise that police funding will be a "priority" under Amendment 3, and how much of it reaches Pasco. And whether the Sheriff's Office under Harrington finally releases what share of those children were Black, Hispanic or disabled.
FMNN sent questions to Sen.-elect Nocco, the Pasco Sheriff's Office and Pasco County Schools this week, with a deadline of 5 p.m. Wednesday, Nov. 11. Their answers will be added here in full context. FMNN has also asked civil-rights groups for the demographic records released after the court's ruling.
Read next: Pasco's Sheriff Goes to the Senate as the County Faces a $1.4 Billion Amendment 3 Hit is part of FMNN's county-by-county guide to the 2027 Legislature.
Sources
Tampa Bay Times, "Targeted" (2020) — https://projects.tampabay.com/projects/2020/investigations/police-pasco-sheriff-targeted/
Institute for Justice, case page and press release on the settlement (Dec. 2024) — https://ij.org/case/pasco-predictive-policing/ · https://ij.org/press-release/case-closed-pasco-sheriff-admits-predictive-policing-program-violated-constitution/
Florida Phoenix, "Pasco County Sheriff's Office settles intelligence-led policing program" (Dec. 5, 2024) — https://floridaphoenix.com/2024/12/05/pasco-county-sheriffs-office-settles-intelligence-led-policing-program/
Reason, on the settlement (Dec. 4, 2024) — https://reason.com/2024/12/04/pasco-county-sheriff-will-end-predictive-policing-program-to-settle-lawsuit-over-harassment/
FOX 13, on the settlement — https://www.fox13news.com/news/pasco-sheriffs-office-settles-lawsuit-over-controversial-data-driven-policing-program
NAACP Legal Defense Fund, report on the Sheriff's Office's surveillance of children (Dec. 2024) — https://www.naacpldf.org/press-release/ldf-issues-report-on-pasco-county-sheriffs-office-surveillance-of-children/
Education Week, "Using Student Data to Identify Future Criminals: A Privacy Debacle" (Nov. 2020) — https://www.edweek.org/technology/using-student-data-to-identify-future-criminals-a-privacy-debacle/2020/11
Washington Examiner, on the manual and scoring — https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/2617060/florida-sheriff-keeps-secret-list-of-potentially-criminal-students-based-on-grades-and-history-of-abuse/
CAIR Florida v. Nocco, Second District Court of Appeal, No. 2D2024-0788 (May 21, 2025) — https://law.justia.com/cases/florida/second-district-court-of-appeal/2025/2d2024-0788.html
Southern Legal Counsel, on the records ruling — https://www.southernlegal.org/news/southern-legal-counsel-wins-public-records-case-against-pasco-county-sheriffnbsp
WTSP, on the court order and fees — https://www.wtsp.com/article/news/local/pascocounty/pasco-county-sheriff-lawsuit-police-program-court-order-fees/67-1cc915f1-d673-401f-a8bf-8b9178943823
PASCO Coalition letter to the superintendent (May 2021) — https://www.naacpldf.org/wp-content/uploads/2021-05-03_pasco_coaltion_open_letter_final_with_logos_formatting_ys_lj.pdf
ProPublica, "Miseducation": Pasco County Schools — https://projects.propublica.org/miseducation/district/1201530
Florida Politics, federal investigators to probe the school policing plan — https://floridapolitics.com/archives/421856-federal-investigators-to-probe-pasco-county-school-policing-plan/
FOX 13, school district limits school resource officers' access to student data — https://www.fox13news.com/news/pasco-school-district-will-limit-school-resource-officers-access-to-student-data
Tampa Bay Times, Sheriff's Office discontinues the program, court documents say (March 2023) — https://www.tampabay.com/news/pasco/2023/03/23/pasco-sheriff-discontinues-controversial-intelligence-program-court-documents-say/
Florida Trend, Tampa Bay Times wins 2021 Pulitzer Prize — https://www.floridatrend.com/article/31485/tampa-bay-times-wins-2021-pulitzer-prize/
WUSF, Nocco wins the Senate special election; Harrington named interim sheriff (Nov. 4, 2026) — https://www.wusf.org/politics-issues/2026-11-04/chris-nocco-wins-state-senate-special-election-jeff-harrington-interim-pasco-sheriff
WFLA, Pasco interim sheriff named after Nocco resigns — https://www.wfla.com/news/pasco-county/pasco-interim-sheriff-named-after-nocco-resigns/
Florida Politics, Nocco on Amendment 3 and police funding — https://floridapolitics.com/archives/827105-gov-desantis-again-uses-state-resources-to-sell-amendment-to-gut-local-revenue/
Florida Division of Elections, Amendment 3 by county (unofficial) — https://floridaelectionwatch.gov/ContestResultsByCounty/900003
WKMG / ClickOrlando, Florida TaxWatch county estimates — https://www.clickorlando.com/news/local/2026/11/03/report-these-places-may-lose-the-most-under-floridas-new-property-tax-plan-clone/
Updates and corrections
No corrections as of publication.