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BREAKING: @lapdcommission just voted 4-0 to approve a face recognition policy. Nearly 70 organizations had opposed this policy, calling for an absolute ban on LAPD face recognition. The Commission also received 943 emails about the policy, 931 of them opposing it.
This is unacceptable. It’s why we need to enact an airtight ban of police face recognition in LA. Police and their "oversight" bodies will always side against the community. We need to take that power away from them.
Our letter was joined by @BLMLA @UTLAnow (the country's 2nd largest teacher union) @ChallengeIneq @LACANetwork @WP4BL @PowerDignity @AIMSo_Cal @YouthJusticeLA @18millionrising @PplsCityCouncil and 60 others. The Police Commission chose to ignore all of us. https://knock-la.com/open-letter-reject-lapd-face-recognition-e970e5ad68b3
The specific FR platform that LAPD uses was built by Data Works Plus, the same company whose system in Detroit has already been used to arrest and prosecute two people based on false matches. Both were Black men. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/24/technology/facial-recognition-arrest.html
Do these look like the same people? The Data Works Plus system matched these faces, leading Detroit police to arrest and prosecute this young man for felony larceny. LAPD is using the same racist system.
LAPD even admitted that the system gives police an “array” of “options” for who to target. Those options will be a menu of harm for LAPD to choose from. This is how surveillance tools expand the discretion police have to stalk, hunt, and kill us.
The hearing was full of police misinformation. Commissioner Briggs claimed the community opposed an “active” “scraping” “scanning” FR system, not LAPD’s "passive" system. That distinction is bullshit. LAPD can take any photo it wants from surveillance footage and run FR on it.
LAPD’s FR system will expand the harm of its vast architecture of surveillance. Now any time a camera that LAPD has access to sees you in public, police can pull that photo and run it through a system containing over 8 million profiles.
Commissioner @SteveSoboroff also mentioned the fight over LAPD drones, which faced similarly massive community opposition when he voted to approve a policy. Soboroff claimed LAPD has since won “public trust” for its use of drones. Do you agree? Do you trust how LAPD uses drones?
We also must name the role of legal reform nonprofits in all this. Nearly 70 community groups had called for a full ban on LAPD face recognition. An @ACLU_SoCal attorney then jumped into the hearing to say the proposed policy didn’t have the right “oversight mechanisms."
Nowhere did the community letter ask for “oversight.” We demanded a ban. Yet sure enough, LAPD’s Director for the Office of Constitutional Policing focused her defense of the policy around ACLU's "oversight" concern, claiming the policy “is exactly designed to address that.”
Every commissioner then used the term “oversight” to justify their vote. No public comment other than ACLU’s mentioned oversight. After 900+ emails, 60+ organizations, and several public comments called for an ABSOLUTE BAN, the commission embraced ACLU’s focus on “oversight.”
One commissioner even mentioned the “gentleman from ACLU” as the basis for his questions to LAPD. He then concluded that LAPD’s system has the “rigorous protections” the ACLU asked about. This is how reform organizations like the ACLU give police a roadmap to expand their harm.
The ACLU attorney also asked for “evidence” that FR is "effective" at “decreasing crime.“ Along with “oversight,” this idea of “efficacy” then became the buzzword the LAPD used to defend the policy. It played right into their hands.
Time and again, reformers supply the terms/cover that police use to expand their violence. And they coopting the community’s demands. Our people demanded a FULL BAN. ACLU signed our letter but then spun it into a call for “efficacy” and “oversight.” Now we all face deadly harm.
We absolutely reject the idea that surveillance can be acceptable if it's "effective." The purpose of surveillance is racial domnination and social control. Asking for "effective" surveillance is exactly what police want. It's playing to lose.
FR harkens back to 18th-century lantern laws, which required Black people to carry lanterns at night to make themselves identifiable for surveillance and racial terror. Likewise, FR forces people to identify who they are as the price for being in public. We need to abolish it.
Today’s setback is not the end of the matter. We will continue building toward a full ban of LAPD face recognition. Join us in our fight to expose how this and other forms of surveillance are used to track, harass, and criminalize Black and brown communities!
