BREAKING: Stop LAPD Spying just filed a public records lawsuit against the City of Los Angeles to expose LAPD's $3.1 billion budget. Read our lawsuit here: http://www.defundsurveillance.org/public-records-lawsuit

We're doing a press conference about the lawsuit with @BLMLA @LACANetwork and @freeradsorg today. It's at LAPD’s doorstep at 10 AM. Pull up to 100 West 1st Street or tune into our Instagram Live! https://www.instagram.com/stoplapdspying/ 

Starting in June 2020, our Defund Surveillance campaign began researching details of LAPD’s budget. But LAPD keeps hiding accounting of the full budget they ask the city to give them each year. That’s why we’re suing.

LAPD’s budget request for 2021-22 will be LA’s largest police budget ever, at a time of dire citywide revenue shortfalls and widespread calls to defund the police. We've been working with @freeradsorg to shut that down. http://www.defundsurveillance.org 

Since Eric Garcetti became mayor, LAPD has killed more people than any police force in the country. Garcetti also increased LAPD’s budget by 48% in that time.

LAPD is very effective at increasing their budget each year, in part because they never reveal everything they want money for. They just say “here's the millions we want to add to last year’s budget.” But no one knows exactly how LAPD will spend all the billions we give them.

LAPD’s secrecy around its budget helps them lie to the public, or least to try. In November, when LAPD released its record-breaking 2021-22 budget proposal, they claimed their $106 proposed INCREASE was a decrease! We lit them up and exposed their lies: https://twitter.com/stoplapdspying/status/1331012332533673985

LAPD has also been using budget secrecy to lie that its spending was cut by $150 million last summer. But their budget allocation was in fact cut by only $12 million from 2020 to 2021, a 0.7% reduction. https://twitter.com/stoplapdspying/status/1357408661673451520

This is the third time Stop LAPD Spying has had to sue LAPD for Public Records Act violations. Our previous cases helped expose LAPD’s Suspicious Activity Reporting program and shut down their LASER and PredPol "predictive" policing experiments.

Defunding the police requires defunding surveillance, which spans everything police do. Police try to claim that surveillance makes them more efficient. But the truth is surveillance increases the harms and costs of policing. http://defundsurveillance.org