This Teen’s Story Is Your Worst ‘Predictive Policing’ Nightmare

‘Connor Deleire was sitting alone in a friend’s car in Manchester, New Hampshire, one late October afternoon in 2015 when the police zeroed in on him. The 18-year-old waited near the intersection of Union and Merrimack Streets as the friend left to pick up his niece a block away. What Deleire didn’t know was that the vehicle was parked in a “predictive hot spot,” an area determined by a computer algorithm used by the Manchester Police Department to be the likely scene of a crime.
Just being in the area was enough to arouse suspicion, officials at the time said. Then, according to police, Deleire failed to give a “legitimate” reason for being there and grew increasingly agitated with officers. The result of that confrontation: Deleire had his head bashed into a cop cruiser, his body zapped with a stun gun, and his face blasted with pepper spray. The beatdown landed him in the hospital with a concussion, his father John Deleire told Vocativ in a recent interview.
In the end, the only crime his son was charged with was resisting arrest.’
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