What happened
It was reported that in October 2023 the Law Enforcement Conduct Commission tabled the final report of Operation Tepito, its five-year investigation into the NSW Police Suspect Targeting Management Plan, and said NSW Police had agreed to discontinue the program. The Commission’s interim report described the STMP, introduced in 2000, as selecting people for sustained proactive policing, repeated stops, searches and home visits, using a risk assessment tool that ranked crime categories into numeric scores. The Commission’s interim report in 2020 examined a cohort of 429 young people placed on the plan between 2016 and 2018 and found a high proportion were recorded as possibly Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander, that police at times used stops and searches on the basis of a person’s STMP status, in lieu, as the Commission put it, of legislative or court-ordered frameworks, that the target selection process may have introduced unacceptable risks of bias, and that the Commission could find no evidence the risk assessment tool had ever been evaluated in two decades of operation.
The Commission’s final report found the problems persisted after earlier reforms. It concluded, in the Commission’s words as reported at the time, that some police interactions with targets were, or may have been, unlawful, that the continued over-representation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander young people indicated the ongoing discriminatory effect of the policy, and that the conduct amounted to agency maladministration. Two precisions matter for the record. Reportedly, the scores were applied by police officers rather than produced by an end-to-end automated system, and the tool shaped decisions officers then acted on. And the Commission withheld a formal finding against the force because NSW Police, after seeing the draft report, agreed to discontinue the plan, first for children in October 2023, then for adults in December. The program that had used a risk-scoring system to place children onto police target lists for two decades ended not with a court ruling but with a watchdog’s report the force chose not to contest in operation.
What an auditable version would have shown
The Commission’s findings pointed to two things the program had never established for itself: whether the risk scores predicted anything, and whom they were falling on. Those central findings, no evidence-based evaluation and disproportionate selection, are the kind of aggregate measures a program’s own records should have surfaced in its first years. An auditable version computes them continuously: signed aggregates of who is selected, on what score components, with what demographic distribution and what subsequent outcomes. A selection tool whose targets are disproportionately Aboriginal children is a fact the agency’s own dashboard should state plainly, in year one, to people obliged to act on it, rather than a conclusion a watchdog assembles from case files two decades in.
Where the gap was
On the Commission’s findings, the tool shaped coercive police attention for two decades with no evidence it had ever been validated. A MetricRecord makes the tool’s aggregate behaviour, selection rates, demographic skew, predictive performance, a signed and reviewable number from the start, which is the evaluation the Commission found had never happened. A ConductRecord ties each stop or visit to what prompted it, the person’s plan status, the score, the claimed legal basis, so that the lawfulness of an interaction can be assessed from the record rather than reconstructed years later from disputed recollections.
What governance should have looked like
A risk score can look like a neutral measurement, but deciding to act on one is a policy choice, and it should be held to both standards: tested to show it works, and accountable like any policy that affects people. When the people scored are children, and the consequence is repeated coercive contact with police, the bar is higher again. The reported lesson of the STMP is that an unvalidated score, applied without records that connect it to the actions it drives, can run unexamined for a generation. The tool’s makers should have to prove it works, continuously and from its own records; the people it targets should never be the ones who have to prove it does not.
Failure Pattern: an unvalidated risk score steered coercive action against people, including children, for two decades with no evaluation of accuracy or disproportionate impact.
Governance Principle: a risk score that steers coercive action must be validated before use and continuously evaluated, from its own records, for accuracy and disproportionate impact.
If this content raises issues for you, help is available. In Australia, Lifeline is on 13 11 14, and 13YARN, a crisis support line for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, is on 13 92 76.
The reference implementation of MetricRecord and ConductRecord is open source. It lives at github.com/saffronandindia/headlights-oss, Apache 2.0 licensed and free to install. The repository is public now.
Sources
- Operation Tepito interim report media release (Law Enforcement Conduct Commission)
- Operation Tepito final report media release (Law Enforcement Conduct Commission)
- NSW Police use of Suspect Targeting Management Plan could meet threshold for serious misconduct, inquiry finds (National Indigenous Times)