NEW PORT RICHEY, Fla. — A civil rights group in Pasco County has sent a letter to the justice department.

The group, "People Against the Surveillance of Children and Overpolicing," is accusing the sheriff's office of discrimination.

The group alleges the Pasco County Sheriff’s Office has been using predictive policing for several years and wants the DOJ to step in.

Predictive policing is using math and analytics to predict criminal behavior before it happens.

"These predictive policing programs have been shown to increase illegal profiling of black and brown youth and communities,” group officials said in their letter. “DOJ funds should not be used to support this unlawful practice."

The program has been used for several years in Pasco. In fact, at least one lawsuit was filed over it.

A lawsuit said it violated parents' constitutional rights since the Pasco County School District provided some of the data.

According to Bay News 9’s partner newspaper the Tampa Bay Times, the sheriff's office said in March 2023 court filings it phased out the program between 2021 and 2022.

They referred to as “prolific offender designation process or prolific offender checks.”

They said instead, they have a program called "focused offenders,” which looks at people reasonably suspected to have committed a crime that's under investigation.

The Pasco County Sheriff's Office responded it a statement, saying: 

"As Pasco Sheriff's Office has consistently maintained, we do not, and have never, engaged in any programs or techniques that are, in any way, shape or form, predictive policing," it read. "We appreciate that the Dept. of Justice's Bureau of Justice Assistance requested an independent third party review of the Focused Deterrence program which concluded, to directly quote the final assessment by the BJA third party review, that there was "no identified disproportionate impact on people of color" and that the program showed "a promising body of evidence suggesting that the strategy may be effective."

"We welcome a review of any of our programs and are confident the results would be the same as the review of the Focused Deterrence program, specifically that media accounts of our operations are wildly different than our actual operations."