Resources

Every day, law enforcement agencies across the country search thousands of cellphones, typically incident to arrest. To search phones, law enforcement agencies use mobile device forensic tools (MDFTs), a powerful technology that allows police to extract a full copy of data from a cellphone — all emails, texts, photos, location, app data, and more — which can then be programmatically searched. As one expert puts it, with the amount of sensitive information stored on smartphones today, the tools provide a “window into the soul.”

This report documents the widespread adoption of MDFTs by law enforcement in the United States. Based on 110 public records requests to state and local law enforcement agencies across the country, our research documents more than 2,000 agencies that have purchased these tools, in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. We found that state and local law enforcement agencies have performed hundreds of thousands of cellphone extractions since 2015, often without a warrant. To our knowledge, this is the first time that such records have been widely disclosed.

Every American is at risk of having their phone forensically searched by law enforcement.

Over the past decade, large urban counties have implemented ShotSpotter, a gun fire detection technology, across the USA. It uses acoustic listening devices to identify discharged firearms’ locations. We examined the effect of ShotSpotter within the 68 large metropolitan counties in the USA from 1999 to 2016. We identified ShotSpotter implementation years through publicly available media. ShotSpotter did not display protective effects for all outcomes. Counties in states with permit-to-purchase firearm laws saw a 15% reduction in firearm homicide incidence rates; counties in states with right-to-carry laws saw a 21% increase in firearm homicide incidence rates. Results suggest that implementing ShotSpotter technology has no significant impact on firearm-related homicides or arrest outcomes. Policy solutions may represent a more cost-effective measure to reduce urban firearm violence.

An interactive map documenting efforts to build cop city training complexes around the US, including a spreadsheet with relevant information. As of February 17, 2024, the spreadsheet provides information on any project related to the assessment, planning, approval, construction, or opening of a renovation or expansion of a Public Safety, Police Training, Academy, or Department in any state.

The child welfare system, more accurately referred to as the family policing system, employs extensive surveillance that disproportionately targets marginalized families, subjecting them to relentless oversight. Scholars observe that this ongoing surveillance obstructs effective parenting, exacerbates existing injustices, and contradicts its stated protective purpose. Instead of safeguarding, surveillance transforms into a tool of control against the families it should assist, particularly those who are already vulnerable. This Article extends the analysis of the family policing system’s surveillance practices to encompass parents with disabilities and their children, revealing the unique consequences of continuous observation. The system’s ableism amplifies scrutiny of disabled parents, disregarding their disability-related needs and causing harm under the guise of protection. The culmination of this persistent surveillance results in heightened systemic harm, trapping families in an inescapable cycle of perpetual scrutiny.

Do investors anticipate that demands for racial equity will impact companies? We explore this question in the context of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement—the largest racially motivated protest movement in U.S. history—and its effect on the U.S. policing industry using a novel dataset on publicly traded firms contracting with the police. It is unclear whether the BLM uprisings were likely to increase or decrease market valuations of firms contracting heavily with police because of the increased interest in reforming the police, fears over rising crime, and pushes to “defund the police”. We find, in contrast to the predictions of economics experts we surveyed, that in the three weeks following incidents triggering BLM uprisings, policing firms experienced a stock price increase of seven percentage points relative to the stock prices of nonpolicing firms in similar industries. In particular, firms producing surveillance technology and police accountability tools experienced higher returns following BLM activism–related events. Furthermore, policing firms’ fundamentals, such as sales, improved after the murder of George Floyd, suggesting that policing firms’ future performances bore out investors’ positive expectations following incidents triggering BLM uprisings. Our research shows how—despite BLM’s calls to reduce investment in policing and explore alternative public safety approaches—the financial market has translated high-profile violence against Black civilians and calls for systemic change into shareholder gains and additional revenues for police suppliers.

Hosts speak with Albert Fox Cahn and Sarah Roth of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project, or S.T.O.P., about the increasing use of surveillance technology to track students. Claiming their technology can predict who will be a threat to themselves or the school, companies market programs that report to school officials on students’ keystrokes, words, and behaviors. School officials can provide it to law enforcement or parents.

This free guide was developed by artist, organizer, and social justice educator Rania El Mugammar. This document provides tools for starting (and continuing) conversations about policing, prisons and transformative justice in the lives of children, families and the broader community. This resource includes prompts, questions, and exercises to help challenge carceral thinking, copaganda, and surveillance to develop a more robust and collective sense of justice.

For now over twenty years, the FBI has detained, surveilled, harassed, and destroyed the lives of innocent Muslims. The public record amply documents how these abuses, inflicted via always-expanding FBI powers, led not to a reduction in terrorism, but painful, farcical, and often dangerous abuses of Muslims.

All of this injustice comes from a list. This list goes by various names – the terrorist watchlist, the Terrorism Screening Database, or as the FBI recently rebranded it, the Terrorism Screening Dataset.

It has long been clear to the Muslim community itself that the FBI’s list is nothing more than a list of innocent Muslims. The consequences of being on the FBI’s list are borne almost exclusively by Muslims, and even individuals who openly espouse political violence generally do not find themselves similarly targeted so long as they themselves are not Muslim.

Around a decade ago, Stop LAPD Spying developed a copwatch practice that we call Watch the Watchers. Copwatch refers to the practice of community members teaming up to observe and document police abuses, especially arrests and other violence. Watch the Watchers built on this practice with a focus on surveillance technologies and patterns. You can watch videos explaining our Watch the Watchers work at May Day actions in MacArthur park in 2015, where we exposed LAPD undercover surveillance, and in 2017, where LAPD officers tried to lie about spy technologies deployed to monitor the crowd.

This website is intended as a tool to empower community members engaged in copwatch and other countersurveillance practices. You can use it to identify officers who are causing harm in your community. The website’s ease of use also makes it a political statement, flipping the direction of surveillance against the state’s agents. Police have vast information about all of us at their fingertips, yet they move in secrecy.