According to interviews and documents obtained by The Verge, Palantir first approached New Orleans in 2012 through a well-known intermediary: James Carville, the Democratic Party power broker and architect of Bill Clinton’s successful 1992 presidential campaign. Carville is a paid adviser of Palantir whose involvement with the data-mining company dates back at least to 2011.“I AM THE SOLE DRIVER OF THAT PROJECT.”
In an interview, Carville told The Verge that he was the impetus for the collaboration between Palantir and New Orleans. “I am the sole driver of that project. It was entirely my idea,” said Carville, adding that he and Palantir CEO Alex Karp flew down to New Orleans to meet with Mayor Landrieu. “To me, it was a case of morality. Young people were shooting each other, and the public wasn’t as involved as they should have been.”
The documents outlining Palantir’s relationship with New Orleans describe the company’s role as “pro bono” and philanthropic. In 2015, Palantir mentioned its work in New Orleans in its annual philanthropic report, characterizing the effort as collaborative “network analysis” for law enforcement and other city stakeholders.
Carville’s remarks on a Bay Area public radio station four years ago elucidate how Palantir’s relationship with the city came about. In a January 2014 appearance on KQED’s Forum talk show, Carville and his wife Mary Matalin touted Palantir’s work in New Orleans as a major driver in the city’s two-year decline in the murder rate.
“The CEO of a company called Palantir – the CEO, a guy named Alex Karp — said that they wanted to do some charitable work, and what’d I think? I said, we have a really horrific crime rate in New Orleans,” Carville told KQED Forum’s host Michael Krasny, without mentioning his professional relationship to Palantir. “And so he came down and met with our mayor… they both had the same reaction as to the utter immorality of young people killing other young people and society not doing anything about it. And we were able to, at no cost to the city, start integrating data and predict and intervene as to where these conflicts were going to be arising. We’ve seen probably a third of a reduction in our murder rate since this project started.”
Matalin, who is also a political consultant, made it clear to Krasny that the prediction work being done with NOPD by the Palo Alto firm was both a prototype and potentially could sweep up innocent people.
Co-founded in 2004 by Alexander Karp and Peter Thiel (the company’s single largest shareholder), Palantir Technologies’ rapid ascent to becoming one of the highest-valued private Silicon Valley companies has been driven by lucrative contracts with the Pentagon and United States intelligence services, as well as foreign security services. In recent years, Palantir has sought to expand its data fusion and analysis business to the private sector, with mixed success.
Prediction is not new territory for Palantir. Since at least 2009, Palantir was used by the Pentagon to predict the location of improvised explosive devices in Afghanistan and Iraq — a wartime risk-assessment program absent the civil liberties concerns that come with individualized predictive policing. Its commercial software platform, Metropolis, also reportedly uses predictive analytics to help businesses develop consumer markets and streamline investments. But before 2012 with the New Orleans program, there is no publicly available record that Palantir had ventured into predictive policing.