Tag Archive for: LAPD

LAPD Infiltrated An Anti-Fascist Protest Group Because The First Amendment Is Apparently Just A Suggestion

/in

Maybe the LAPD doesn’t have the experience its counter-coastal counterpart has in inflicting damage to rights and liberties, but it’s trying, dammit! The NYPD’s brushes with the Constitution are numerous and perpetual. The LAPD may have spent more time working on the Fourth and Fifth Amendments during its Rampart peak, but now it’s rolling up on the First Amendment like a repurposed MRAP on a small town lawn.

The Los Angeles Police Department ordered a confidential informant to monitor and record meetings held by a political group that staged protests against President Trump in 2017, a move that has drawn concern and consternation from civil rights advocates.

On four separate occasions in October 2017, the informant entered Echo Park United Methodist Church with a hidden recorder and captured audio of meetings held by the Los Angeles chapter of Refuse Fascism, a group that has organized a number of large-scale demonstrations against the Trump administration in major U.S. cities, according to court records reviewed by The Times.

Perhaps no entities show more concern about opposition to fascism than law enforcement agencies, for some weird and completely inexplicable reason. Somehow, this investigation involved the Major Crimes Division, which felt the need to get involved because of all the major criminal activity that is the hallmark of protest groups.

What sort of major crimes are we talking about? Well, let’s just check the record…

Police reports and transcripts documenting the informant’s activities became public as part of an ongoing case against several members of Refuse Fascism who were charged with criminal trespassing…

I see the term “major” has been redefined by the Major Crimes Division to encompass anything it might feel the urge to investigate. Supposedly, this incursion on the First Amendment was the result of an “abundance of caution” following reports of violent clashes between anti-fascists and alt-right demonstrators at other protests/rallies.

Again, the LAPD seems to not understand the meaning of the words it uses, because an “abundance of caution” should have resulted in steering clear of First Amendment-protected activities, rather than infiltrating them.

Also, an abundance of caution might have resulted in the LAPD checking out the other set of theoretical combatants, but the Los Angeles Times reports a police official said no attempt was made to infiltrate any far-right protest groups.

“Major.” “Caution.” “Consistency.” These words are beyond the department’s comprehension. And here’s the kicker: the Major Crimes Division did not send its informant in until after the demonstration was already over, the freeway had already been blocked, and criminal trespassing charges had already been brought. This wasn’t an investigation. It was a fishing expedition targeting people who don’t like fascists that used the First Amendment as a doormat. Calls to the LAPD’s Irony Division were not returned.

I guess we’re all supposed to feel better about this now that the LAPD has promised to investigate itself over its First Amendment-infringing infiltration. But it seems a department that routinely struggles to use words properly and cannot steer clear of the Constitutional shoreline shouldn’t be trusted to run a fax machine, much less an internal investigation.

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LAPD Watchdog Says Department’s Data-Based Policing Is Producing Nothing But Wasted Time And Rights Violations

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The Los Angeles Police Department has just received some bad news from its oversight. It’s probably good news for the policed — many of whom are being disproportionately targeted thanks to biased input data — but the LAPD can’t be pleased that its reliance on expensive, mostly-automated tools hasn’t produced worthwhile results.

The department relies on a handful of tech tools to aid in its policing, but it doesn’t appear to be helping. It has CompStat — a holdover from the early 2000’s when Bill Bratton still ran the department. To that framework, it has added LASER — a nifty acronym that stands for “Los Angeles’ Strategic Extraction and Restoration.” The program with the reverse engineered nickname actually relies on input from human analysts to determine where officers should be deployed. But this reliance on data-driven policing isn’t making the city any safer, despite LASER’s focus on violent crime.

Here’s what the LAPD’s human analysts put together for the department’s patrol officers.

In perhaps the most contentious strategy, each of the department’s 21 geographic areas used data to compile lists or “bulletins” of people calculated to be among the top 12 “chronic offenders.”

The program assigns people points based on prior criminal histories, such as arrest records, gang affiliation, probation and parole status and recent police contacts.

This strategy received some public blow-back, resulting in the department abandoning it last August. Nothing of value was lost.

[Inspector General Mark] Smith examined data collected prior to the suspension.

He found 44 percent of chronic offenders had either zero or one arrest for violent crimes. About half had no arrest for gun-related crimes.

So much for curbing violent crime. All it did was create a loop where cops targeted nonviolent offenders, resulting in another arrest/detention that added more points to the person’s LASER record, resulting in even more targeting and, inevitably, more interactions with police officers. It’s a feedback loop no one can escape.

To make things worse, officers had the power to place people into this damaging loop by “nominating” them for targeting with LASER. The point-based system that was supposed to limit this targeting to just the worst of worst street criminals could be bypassed. Nominated citizens would find themselves rising up the ranks on the LASER lists, racking up points simply by officers performing stops based on faulty inputs.

And while the tech is supposedly improving, the quality of policing isn’t. CompStat has had nearly a 20-year run in LA, but its results are negligible. Predictive policing — which has its own bias issues — isn’t doing any better.

Like the other program, Smith found discrepancies with the data collection and could not draw conclusions to “meaningfully evaluate” the program’s overall effectiveness to reduce crime, the report said.

Unfortunately, the report recommends the LAPD stay the course. The LAPD is supposed to spend more time “reviewing” the data that isn’t producing results and tailor its outputs with an eye on Constitutional rights. As it stands now, the LAPD is allowing databases to conjure up reasonable suspicion for stops. That can’t keep happening. But the way forward can’t be more of the same, only at a slightly slower pace.

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