Miami-Dade to Spend Millions on Software to Identify Dirty Cops

Bad apples in the Miami-Dade Police Department might have to watch their backs now that the county has approved a contract that will spend up to $9 million to weed out cops with a pattern of misconduct.

County commissioners have unanimously approved a long-term contract with the Chicago-based Benchmark Analytics for a data management system to monitor and flag troublesome police officers before they open local government up to lawsuits. Commissioners say the system will help the Miami-Dade Police Department (MDPD) track officer performance issues, disciplinary history, and use of force incidents, among other markers.

"Our police department needs it right now," Oliver Gilbert, chairman of the Miami-Dade County Commission, said during an October 3 county meeting. "They need it. We should do it."

MDPD is the eighth-largest police agency in the nation, with more than 3,000 officers. The new software will monitor sworn officers and the police department's roughly 1,500 civilian employees, according to a memo from the county mayor's office.

The contract includes an initial five-year term that will cost Miami-Dade $2.26 million. The county has an option to extend the deal for two additional five-year terms that would bring the total estimated cost to $9.07 million.

Commissioner Gilbert emphasized that there's no guarantee Miami-Dade's first sheriff since the 1960s — who will be elected next year under a 2018 voter-approved Florida constitutional amendment — will continue to use the system while in office. The sheriff position was eliminated more than 50 years ago after a sprawling corruption scheme involving the county's law enforcement agency at the time, the Dade County Sheriff's Office.

"This has to be said to the board, but also to the community. This is one of those things that when you start getting big-ticket items like this that are coming through, we have to be mindful because there's no requirement that [the county] keep the systems that we put in place."

Thanks to a new era of police accountability, a handful of violent MDPD arrests have come to light in recent years via bodycam and cellphone footage. Just in the last year, several county police officers have also landed themselves in jail for COVID-19 federal loan fraud, battery, and drunk driving.

In August, five MDPD officers were reportedly "relieved of duty" for allegedly abusing the department's overtime system.

Founded in 2017, Benchmark Analytics is partly owned by the University of Chicago, which helped it develop research to identify patterns of police behavior that could lead to misconduct.

The policing analytics firm's system provides an "early-intervention tool" that helps weed out bad apples by tracking everything from use-of-force incidents to roadway crashes to citizen complaints and K9 deployment. The system is intended to alert supervisors and raise flags about officers' problematic behavior proactively before it exposes local governments to legal liability.

The early-intervention tool can also provide supervisors' with warnings about officers who may need training or assistance with their job duties. 

"Benchmark assists agencies with understanding performance with a focus on exposure to rising liability costs, employee performance, and the significant costs associated with public criticism, media scrutiny, lack of transparency, and strained community relations," reads the county's contract with Benchmark Analytics.

Benchmark Analytics has negotiated with various law enforcement agencies across the country for deals to implement its software over the past few years. In 2020, following the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officers, the Minneapolis Police Department sought to partner with the firm, though the department later ran into funding issues with the project. In September, the Baltimore Police Department penned a $2.5 million, three-year agreement with the company for its data monitoring system. In early October, the City of San Francisco was deciding whether or not to upgrade its system with the firm's software.

The company operates in an emerging industry for advanced police monitoring, vying against competitors Guardian Tracking and IAPro for local law enforcement contracts.

Early studies of police staff-monitoring software showed that the tools can have a mixed impact on officer morale. Although some rank-and-file officers appreciate that the systems address misconduct and zero in on cops with behavior problems, other staffers feel as if the software subjects them to undue scrutiny, one study showed.

Axon, which sells police Tasers and body-worn cameras in addition to a police staff-monitoring system, says that by highlighting praiseworthy officers, modern software in the field can avoid "the morale decay and wagon-circling observed in more punitive systems."

MDPD didn't immediately respond to questions from New Times, including an inquiry about how it currently aggregates and reviews officers' conduct history.