A fiery debate erupted at a Jan. 22 City Council work session over a proposed contract between Durham Police Department and Peregrine Technologies, a law enforcement data management platform. The $517,000 contract would support the creation of a “Real Time Crime Center” operated with Peregrine’s software, which would aggregate all digital police data into one platform for analysis.
According to the Durham Police Department and Peregrine, the center would expedite police investigations and reduce crime through faster, integrated data modeling. On Thursday, some residents urged the City Council to reject the contract over concerns about surveillance, the software’s use of AI, and data privacy.
The council will vote on the contract at its Feb. 2 meeting. At the work session, council members Nate Baker and Chelsea Cook said they plan to reject the contract while Mayor Leonardo Williams expressed his support. Council members Shanetta Burris, Matt Kopac, and Carl Rist did not share how they planned to vote. Javiera Caballero opposes the contract but will be absent from Monday’s meeting.
Peregrine and Palantir
Several speakers at the meeting expressed fears about data privacy and “predictive policing,” the use of crime data and historical trends to predict potential criminal activity. Durham resident Jen Wickman and shared concerns about Peregrine misusing information obtained from police department data. Several other speakers pointed to the company’s connections to Palantir Technologies, a software firm which has contracted with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to help that agency track immigrant movements.
Nick Noone, CEO and co-founder of Peregrine, previously worked at Palantir where he led the company’s work with a 2014 U.S. military operation identifying ISIS members in Syria. Noone has stated that Palantir alumni comprise a quarter of his Peregrine team, and that Palantir’s DNA is strong in Peregrine.
“Educate yourself in the wide-reaching harm of this technology and ongoing misuse, as well as the people profiting from it,” Wickman said. “It doesn’t matter how benevolent any local agency is, these companies have their own plans for the data.”
Police department officials and Peregrine representatives counter that the company would not own or sell police department data, only “insights from the data.” In November, the city held a series of seven town hall meetings about the proposed center and the Peregrine contract, each attended by less than 20 people.
According to a FAQ released by the city, Peregrine uses a “safety flagging” tool which identifies patterns and risk factors based on historical data to forecast future activity.
Speaking at the meeting, Paul Barton said the tool could reinforce biased policing.
“[Peregrine states] on their website that they use crime rates and arrest records to identify patterns and predict crime hotspots,” Barton said. “So if police are allocated most often to a hot spot, then that spot will continue to receive activity and remain hot.”
Other residents voiced concerns about Peregrine’s use of AI tools.
Errors by algorithms?
“Errors are being made by algorithms resulting in violence done by humans with no accountability to those harmed,” Wickman said.
According to a handout from the company, Peregrine’s AI features are optional, and are used primarily to summarize information, deduplicate data, and generate safety flags.
Council members Baker, Caballero, and Kopac criticized the contract, saying their concerns about surveillance and community safety still lingered.
“I’m hearing an absolute right to demand that the city do what we can to reduce the crime they experience in their communities,” Kopac said. “At the same time, I think more than one thing can be true. And I think this proposal raises a lot of real concerns that I share.”
Baker said he would only support the contract if more robust protections were in place, such as an advisory board on surveillance and privacy.
After a series of critical comments by nine speakers, one citizen offered a resounding “yes” for Peregrine on Thursday. Durham resident Victoria Peterson gave a passionate speech about crime in Durham’s Black community. She said she was desperate for the city to support policing to improve community safety.
‘We can’t enjoy life’
“We can’t enjoy life,” Peterson said. “If they need a million dollars for cameras, give it to them. I’m tired of Black men being murdered in this community.”
Durham Police Chief Patrice Andrews also condemned comments about Peregrine that she labeled as disinformation. Both Andrews and Williams emphasized that unlike other companies such as Flock, Peregrine does not own police department data and cannot train its AI models with it.
“This is not surveillance technology,” Andrews said. “We started envisioning the Real-Time Crime Center two years ago and what was priority for us is reducing the time for investigations so that we would be able to actually have some closure for victims, survivors, and families of violent crime.”
Andrews said the department plans to use Peregrine to integrate its digital information into one platform in order to close cases faster and arrest offenders. The department would keep strict controls on access to the software and the data it aggregates, she said. The department would also conduct regular audits of digital activity within the platform.
Mayor Leonardo Williams struck a similar note. He underlined the fact that Black Durhamites are disproportionately affected by gun violence.
“I’m looking forward to the day where the folks that are closest to this terror can actually identify what the city is doing for them, rather than what we’re not giving a chance,” Williams said. “If I was voting on this today, I would vote ‘heck yes.’”
In an interview after the meeting, Williams criticized Thursday’s speakers for overly cautious, unrealistic concerns about surveillance and data privacy. Residents routinely rely without complaint on technology that could prompt the same concerns, like cell phones he said. He argued that Thursday’s meeting was not representative of broader opinion in Durham. Critics are ignoring the needs and opinions of residents who the contract could protect, he said.
“The moment we want to use technology to help us better protect the communities that are dealing with this [violence] the most, which is mainly the Black community, all of a sudden people have an issue with it,” Williams said. “It just baffles me that the majority of those people do not live in actual pain and terror every day.”
Halle Vazquez
