“Project Sequoia”: Seattle PD plans rollout of new bad apple intervention system

“Project Sequoia”: Seattle PD plans rollout of new bad apple intervention system
Collage: HardPressed Source Images: Seattle Police Department

The Seattle Police Department (SPD) is planning to implement a new Early Intervention System (EIS) developed in partnership with controversial tech company Accenture. 

The EIS system, mandated by Seattle’s 2012 consent decree, aims to “identify and mitigate against factors that may lead to negative performance issues, employee discipline, and/or employee or department liability,” within the SPD’s sworn staff according to the SPD’s policy manual

In total, the EIS itself is not meant to be used as a disciplinary tool, but as “a key element in the SPD’s strategy to support employee wellness.”

If an officer meets certain threshold criteria within the EIS, a commander is required to initiate an assessment of the officer and then develop a mentoring plan, “if appropriate,” according to the SPD’s policy manual. 

In 2018 Crosscut reported that the department was planning to replace its current EIS with something else and that the system itself flat out “doesn’t work.” A year later, an SPD public presentation video revealed that a single South precinct patrol squad of six officers had generated 45 EIS alerts. 

New documents obtained by HardPressed show that the EIS rarely flagged officers at all in 2021, apart from 16 cops involved in multiple car crashes. According to SPD Public Affairs, the department’s current EIS is run through IAPro software, “and will for the foreseeable future.” 

The full numbers of flagged cops related to each of the department’s threshold criteria at the time is shown below:

Source: Seattle Police Department Public Records Request Data
Seattle Police Department's current EIS threshold criteria for intervention https://public.powerdms.com/Sea4550/tree/documents/2042848

“Project Sequoia”

However, in 2020, the SPD entered into an agreement with the $225 billion consulting behemoth Accenture to develop an entirely new EIS from scratch, codenamed Project Sequoia. According to the SPD, the outcome of this work, “is almost ready to launch (technically) but has not been presented to the employee group as an alternative to EIS yet.”

HardPressed obtained the SPD’s contract with Accenture that highlights how “Accenture is investing in commercially developed machine learning products for public safety” and that Accenture had “approached [the SPD] to collaborate on a research project, through Accenture investment.”

The contract was never publicly disclosed on the City of Seattle’s public facing contracts database. Further, it states that the research project will “use data analytics and machine learning to understand indicators and predict risks around Officer behaviour [sic][...] to help develop an EIS proof of concept.”

Contract documents show that Accenture assigned 14 of its own employees to develop the new EIS product itself with the SPD. 

In June 2020, one SPD staffer, Loren Atherley, who is involved in the project, highlighted its pending implementation in another jurisdiction, Minneapolis, where a CBS report highlighted, “another plan for reform within the department: using real-time data to alert supervisors to problematic behavior by individual officers so that police leaders can quickly intervene.” This was “Project Sequoia,” according to a Microsoft Teams message sent by Atherley in June 2020. 

Accenture's Artificial Intelligence and Public Safety Manager Lauren Cziok, who led the company's contract with the SPD, is based in Minneapolis. She previously posted numerous bar photos of herself with Atherley and a former SPD executive Chris Fisher. Another post of challenge coins Cziok collected shows paraphernalia collected from Target Corporation, ICE, and Minneapolis Police, among others.

In August 2021, Fisher, Atherley and another SPD executive, Rebecca Boatright, published a paper highlighting that the EIS system developed with Accenture “utilizes approximately 200 features and label data from more than five years of complaints investigated by the Office of Police Accountability.” 

“The solution utilizes abstractions of performance data (e.g., number of Terry stops at periodic intervals prior to receiving a complaint), subject level characteristics (e.g., officer title, officer demographics, years of experience, assignment, etc.) and time usage data (as a proxy for fatigue or acute interpersonal / financial stress),” according to their paper.

The SPD is continuing to develop this product today. 

Controversial history

As one of the largest companies in the world, with a greater market capitalization than Morgan Stanley, Accenture is no stranger to big bill settlements with federal law enforcement and has faced numerous public controversies. 

In 2011, Accenture resolved a federal false claims lawsuit with the DOJ, alleging that the company received kickbacks, fraudulently inflated prices and rigged government contract bids, eventually agreeing to pay almost $64 million to the DOJ. 

In 2018, a U.S. Department of Homeland Security Office of Inspector General report found that Accenture had not provided results on a $297 million contract aimed at hiring more officers for the U.S. Customs and Border Patrol (CBP). Ten months into the contract, Accenture had been paid $13.6 million and processed two accepted CBP job offers.

In 2019, Accenture paid Swiss authorities almost $200 million to settle a tax investigation. 

A 2023 no-bid contract Accenture signed with Los Angeles County was called “one of the weirdest--and most dangerous--contracts I've seen in my career,” according to civil rights attorney Alec Karakatsanis. 

More recently, the DOJ initiated a probe into Accenture’s Federal Services group based on “allegations that one or more employees gave inaccurate information over its compliance with federal security controls,” according to a Reuters report.

That hasn’t stopped Accenture from holding an image-boosting promotional coat drive for kids in 2024 in partnership with the SPD. 

Proactive Integrated Support Mechanism (PrISM) 

In February 2024, the SPD filed an “Outcome Measurement Update” in federal court, announcing a new EIS system dubbed the Proactive Integrated Support Mechanism (PrISM), born out of the department’s Project Sequoia work with Accenture.  

A mélange of technical writing described the PrISM as combining “highly accurate forecasting methods based in machine learning, state of the art explainability modeling founded in game theory and the principles of human centric design to render a highly accurate assessment of emergent risk and protective factors in employee behavior. Utilizing the meteorological concepts of watches and warnings, PrISM uses our ability to recognize a known pattern of failure to enhance a highly accurate forecast to be actionable, or a warning. Where a forecast of failure exists but does not fit a known pattern, a watch is communicated. Unlike conventional EIS, these conditions persist (calculated every week) until a change in conditions alters the forecast, the pattern of explainability, or both.”

The federal court update also included a tid bit, that the SPD’s PrISM would soon be rolled out as a randomized trial for twelve months. The SPD did not respond to a question if this “trial” has begun yet.

The court filing additionally included screenshots of the newly developed user interface for the PrISM system, shown below:

Source: Seattle Police Department

Premium price?

SPD’s Federal Court Monitor Antonio Oftelie previously enjoyed Accenture partnerships for numerous events run through his private company, Leadership for a Networked World (LNW). 

Accenture even partnered with LNW to perform a survey of 2,000 people specifically to coincide with LNW’s public safety summit in 2015 produced “in collaboration with Accenture.” 

In October 2021 Oftelie texted a group chat with former SPD executive Chris Fisher, who signed SPD’s contract with Accenture. Oftelie wrote, “Was the intent of Accenture and SPD to open-source EIS and/or the thought leadership around it? Or is Acc going to sell this at premium price to other cities?” 

“Open source as much as we can,” Fisher texted back.

The SPD told HardPressed in an email that “we do not allow Accenture to productize or otherwise protect the intellectual property of work generated with public assets. We intend to release an open-source version of PrISM once its validated.”

In direct contradiction to SPD's statements, the department's contract with Accenture explicitly states that "Accenture will own all intellectual property rights," of the technology it develops. Further, the SPD "will provide Accenture with a perpetual, unlimited license to use any suggestions, ideas, insights," provided by the SPD related to the EIS development.

If the company “sees viability in the PoC [Proof of Concept] and decides to productionize the PoC to create an initial EIS product,” the SPD would be given “a $0 license to use this initial EIS product, subject to further dependencies and the terms of applicable license agreements,” according to the contract documents.

Accenture and Amazon Web Services (AWS) have also been engaged by the SPD to develop the departments Data Analytics Platform (DAP) which served as a baseline information environment to initiate their new PrISM system.

Representatives of Accenture did not respond to multiple requests for comment. 

In making the pitch for a new and improved EIS, the SPD’s top lawyer Rebecca Boatright, Fisher, and Atherley wrote that officer accountability and mentorship “controls are in place,” however they are “sometimes ill conceived and often poorly understood and obscured from view - leaving much to the imagination.” 

Apart from a couple pages of technical word salad pumped into a single court filing, the SPD’s new EIS, developed with monster tech consultant Accenture, has been created in a black box, outside of public view, its full capabilities, limitations, and scope of review still remain secret to the public.

How Accenture leverages Seattle’s government data to sell a new “public safety” tech product remains murky, as the SPD’s claims that Accenture will not monetize a product developed with public assets are not the terms that the department unilaterally agreed to in their 2020 contract with the multibillion dollar consulting giant. 

1/30/25 Update: The Minneapolis Police Department told HardPressed that the "MPD does not contract with Accenture for EIS," and told HardPressed to submit a public records request for more information.