![]() But the community eventually prevailed: in April 2019, LAPD ended Operation LASER. When the Los Angeles community opposed Operation LASER, LAPD officials used Vera’s report to defend their violence. ![]() The report called on police departments to adopt “data-driven strategies such as hot-spot policing, problem-oriented policing, and intelligence-led policing.” In 2014, the national advocacy nonprofit Vera Institute published a report with the federal Bureau of Justice Assistance that described “predictive policing” as a new “paradigm” of police analysis and highlighted LAPD’s Operation Los Angeles Strategic Extraction and Restoration (LASER) as “an example” of this trend. Like many other aspects of policing that communities are working to dismantle, data-driven policing began as reform. Before LAPD formalized data-driven policing their terror tactics included Operation Hammer (using military equipment acquired for the Olympics to raid Black and Brown neighborhoods) and the Safer Cities Initiative (an offensive of draconian “broken windows” arrests targeting unhoused Black people in Skid Row). Before modern policing it was lantern laws, sunset towns, slave catchers, and Black Codes. Colonizers, imperialists, and police have long gathered data on the people they subjugate in order to monitor, target, control, or eliminate them. While police use of algorithms or Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology might be novel, the underlying purposes are not. ![]() Today’s data-driven policing builds on past practices of speculatively criminalizing our communities and policing Black and Brown identities through the white gaze. Many of these technologies and methods were developed for the US’s imperial wars abroad, another example of local police adopting military weapons alongside the tanks and grenade-launchers. ![]() LAPD uses these systems to generate profiles of people, develop hotspot maps, and create secret hit lists of who to target. These systems draw from a vast web of surveillance sources, data brokers, state agencies, and open-source information, putting this data at police fingertips. The term refers to the collection and mining of mass data to determine which people and places will be policed. Seizing on this recognition, we need to mobilize fiercer resistance to reform as it happens before it expands police power.ĭata-driven policing is the latest shape that LAPD’s war on our communities is taking. Today, more and more people see that reform is how police increase their resources and powers. This process is facilitated largely by people who might be uneasy with policing’s optics but remain invested in its preservation.Īt the same time that reformers have helped LAPD absorb shocks and strengthen themselves, our communities have resisted the white supremacist state’s violence, including by rejecting reform. Throughout this history, the machinery used to police Los Angeles has been renewed and strengthened through the process of reform. The Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) has long been at the vanguard of this renewal, spending billions of dollars to pioneer new ways to control and dominate Black, migrant, poor, and Indigenous communities. Policing is an old, racist institution that keeps renewing itself. Read our new article in Issue 35 of The Abolitionist, Critical Resistance‘s “publication dedicated to the strategy and practice of prison industrial complex abolition.” You can read the article below, download the pdf here, and subscribe to The Abolitionist here.ĭata-Driven Policing: Abolition Requires a Culture of Resistance
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