After nearly five years of preparation, a three-way agreement between St. Paul, Ramsey County and the St. Paul Public Schools to share youth data and target young people with services even before a crisis emerges will be dissolved amid withering criticism and community pushback.
The goal was at once simple and sweeping. Rather than wait until a young person is arrested or in crisis, public officials would be able to predict which families were most likely to slip through the cracks based on zip codes, incomes, truancy numbers, race and other indicators.
Ramsey County began exploring the potential of “predictive analytics” in 2014, and the city, county and school district signed a joint powers agreement allowing them to share youth data between them in 2018.
That agreement will be canceled.
“During this process, we received feedback from many in our community … whom we have longstanding relationships with,” said St. Paul Mayor Melvin Carter, addressing the media Monday in the lobby outside his City Hall office. “What’s not being dissolved is the relationship between these three entities. Our unwavering commitment to work better and smarter together remains.”
The mayor was joined by Ramsey County Commissioner Jim McDonough and St. Paul Schools Superintendent Joe Gothard, who jointly announced that a series of community listening sessions will be held in March at dates and locations to be announced.
“We owe it to our kids to help them succeed in school and in life,” said McDonough, noting that the county’s “deep end” juvenile justice services, such as Boys Totem Town, have had a positive reputation overall. “What we’ve heard from families … is that they need more help well in advance of these services.”
Gothard said the school district, city and county already cooperate in a number of ways, such as partnering with nonprofits to provide after-school programs and family services within schools and rec centers, and he expected those relationships to strengthen.
“We do work in great ways right now,” he said.
PUSHBACK WAS INTERNAL, TOO
School board members had expressed excitement about the prospect of surrounding families with services even before a crisis erupts. But the possibility of labeling children who had not committed a crime as potential future troublemakers worried advocacy organizations such as IN Equality, which seeks alternatives to incarceration for young offenders.
They noted that the data effort was led in part by prosecutors — the Ramsey County Attorney’s office had received more than $150,000 in funding from the Bush Foundation.
In August, two dozen organizations and a host of community leaders signed a joint letter to the city, county and school district asking them to withdraw from the joint powers agreement. They included leadership of the St. Paul Promise Neighborhood, the West Side Neighborhood Organization, the American Indian Prison Project and CAIR MN.
Some of the pushback even came from within the mayor’s office. Jason Sole, appointed by Carter last March to serve as the director of the city’s Community-First Public Safety Initiative, had long argued against predictive analytics and repeated his concerns on Jan. 21 in a pointed and wide-ranging letter to the mayor.
On Friday, in what was widely perceived to be a forced resignation, the mayor’s office confirmed that Sole would no longer hold the position as of Feb. 4.
Critics have questioned the degree to which law enforcement would be involved in using predictive analytics to track families who had done no wrong.
Carter told reporters Monday that was not the intent of the three-way effort, but he acknowledged the lack of trust and community buy-in.
“There’s an enormous body of research that shows predictive analytics, when used for law enforcement and public safety, can go awry pretty fast,” Carter said.
“This never has been our goal. … Some future mayor, superintendent, county board could use that data in a way that none of us would deem constructive,” the mayor acknowledged. “Success … is going to require a level of community confidence, and trust and buy-in that we have yet to gain.”
Marika Pfefferkorn, co-founder of the Coalition to Stop the School to Prison Algorithm, said Monday that the data-sharing effort would have assigned longstanding risk scores to students, raising constitutional issues around privacy.
“Our elected officials had no idea what they agreed to, and the implications that could come from it,” said Pfefferkorn, in an interview. “Data is not bad, but data without any kind of oversight that includes the community does not benefit us.”
She added, “No one was able to answer how much it would actually cost.”
