Durham police seek contract with Peregrine for real-time digital crime center

Between the lines: The Durham City Council has, in recent years, debated the merits of using technology to improve response times to crimes like shootings, even briefly piloting the use of the company ShotSpotter's gunshot detection tech.

• ShotSpotter's effectiveness has been debated and was controversial in Durham. The city council ultimately did not approve a full-time contract with it.

Driving the news: The Durham Police Department held a series of Q&A sessions with the public about potentially bringing on Peregrine's software.

• The city council, which discussed the contract in a work session in October, has not yet set a date for voting on the contract.

How it works: Peregrine's platform combines data from a wide variety of sources — like the 911 system, warrant databases, and evidentiary records — and makes it easy to search and map data points.

• Durham's police chief, Patrice Andrews, told city council that Peregrine's platform does not integrate any data sources that the Durham Police Department doesn't already use.
• She described it as operating like the police department's internal version of Google search. "It is data that we currently maintain, but it's in a disjointed way," she said. "This is not software that anyone can just come in and wantonly look up anyone."

Yes, but: Some residents who attended the work session expressed concerns about privacy and how the data Peregrine collects would be stored. There were also concerns raised that one of the founders of Peregrine previously worked at Palantir, which has contracted with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

• Andrews said for someone to access Durham's data, they would "have to be from law enforcement agencies ... and verify that they actually are working an active criminal case and tie it into one of our cases." That's not different, she said, than the existing process the police department maintains.
• The company says it does not work with nor is it contracted with ICE. It also does not share customer data unless explicitly instructed by a customer to do so.

The big picture: Still, local governments seeking to add new technology partners have drawn fresh scrutiny in light of the increasing number of federal immigration raids occurring nationwide and now here in North Carolina.

• Police in Charlottesville, Virginia, backed out of a contract with Peregrine earlier this year, after that town's city council expressed concerns about how the data could be used in immigration enforcement efforts, 29News reported. Peregrine's tech is used by hundreds of public safety agencies in 26 states, however, according to the company.

• In Evanston, Illinois, officials removed a separate license plate reader technology over concerns about federal agencies accessing the data.

What they're saying: Durham City Council member Javiera Caballero told Axios she is not worried about how local police would use Peregine, but rather how federal immigration agencies might gain access to it.

• "My bar is really high" when it comes to adding new technology, Caballero told Axios, noting she was not a fan of ShotSpotter.
• "And that's not to speak ill of our police department. I understand their desire," she added. "It's that we cannot trust our federal officials, regardless of how good our police are or what their intentions may be."

A spokesperson for Peregrine said that Peregrine's platform is not more accessible than the city's existing data collection.

• "Durham Police Department data is no more subject to legal or regulatory discovery when accessed via a third-party platform like Peregrine than it is when accessed directly," a spokesperson for the company said.

Editor's note: This story has been corrected to show that one founder of Peregrine previously worked at Palantir (not multiple founders).

• The story also includes new comments from the company.