Resources

A chart that breaks down the difference between reformist reforms which continue or expand the reach of policing, and abolitionist steps that work to chip away and reduce its overall impact.

The expanding surveillance and criminalization of mutual aid, self-managed care, and bodily autonomy, and the growing attempts to criminalize pregnant people, parents, and health care providers have far-reaching ramifications beyond abortion criminalization that require us to join together to collectively resist!

Hundreds of restrictive bills have been proposed, many passed, including the Texas law (SB8) that not only bans abortion after six weeks, but deputizes civilians to police each other’s reproductive decisions. Such laws are just the latest examples in a long history of criminalizing bodily autonomy, especially for Black, Indigenous, migrant, disabled, queer, and trans people, and people with low incomes who will experience the harshest impacts of anti-abortion legislation.

This brief offers an analysis of how our movements are connected, and how to push back against a widening web of criminalization.

The Stalker State is the information gathering, storing, and sharing environment we are all immersed in. This is an ever-changing, ever-evolving web of agencies and organizations that embody a toxic culture of data collection with the intent to police us and cause harm. It doesn’t only watch us to invade privacy, it watches to criminalize us. We invite you to explore the imagery and contemplate how all these entities connect in a way that leads to harm.

The STOP LAPD Spying Coalition has been on the forefront in the fight against data-driven policing and surveillance. Their ground-breaking work combines community research to expose surveillance and policing tech, visual and creative tools to demystify new technologies and hands-on organising. All with the explicitly abolitionist aim of building power on the ground to dismantle the carceral technologies of what they have coined the Stalker State. We invited Stop LAPD Spying Coalition members Shakeer Rahman and Hamid Khan to talk about their work and their experiences on research and mapping of surveillance technologies.

This episode examines how news and pop cultural media deputize and urge listeners, readers, and viewers to act as neighborhood vigilantes. We study how this instills a climate of constant, unnecessary fear; presents the current US and criminal legal system as the only option to reduce crime; excludes crimes against the poor and working class like wage theft, food and housing insecurity, and lack of healthcare; and how these systemics can inflict unjust harm upon the subjects of these anonymous tips.

The expansion of digital record keeping by police departments across the U.S. in the 1990s ushered in the era of data-driven policing. Huge metropolises like New York City crunched reams of crime and arrest data to find and target “hot spots” for extra policing. Researchers at the time found that this reduced crime without necessarily displacing it to other parts of the city—although some of the tactics used, such as stop-and-frisk, were ultimately criticized by a federal judge, among others, as civil rights abuses.

The next development in data-informed policing was ripped from the pages of science fiction: software that promised to take a jumble of local crime data and spit out accurate forecasts of where criminals are likely to strike next, promising to stop crime in its tracks. One of the first, and reportedly most widely used, is PredPol, its name an amalgamation of the words “predictive policing.” The software, derived from an algorithm used to predict earthquake aftershocks, was developed by professors at UCLA and released in 2011. By sending officers to patrol these algorithmically predicted hot spots, these programs promise they will deter illegal behavior.

But law enforcement critics had their own prediction: that the algorithms would send cops to patrol the same neighborhoods they say police always have, those populated by people of color. Because the software relies on past crime data, they said, it would reproduce police departments’ ingrained patterns and perpetuate racial injustice, covering it with a veneer of objective, data-driven science.

On today’s show we discuss the gunshot detection system ShotSpotter with Alejandro Ruizesesparza from the Cancel ShotSpotter Coalition and Jonathan Manes, an attorney in the MacArthur Justice Center’s Illinois Office. Our discussion focuses on why activists and communities are rising up to confront the Chicago Police Department on their use of ShotSpotter.

This report was researched and written by dozens of community members collaborating through the Stop LAPD Spying Coalitionʼs Land and Policing Workgroup. Over the past decade, the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition has been building community power to abolish LAPD surveillance. This report grew out of that organizing and examines the relationship of data-driven policing to real estate development, displacement, and gentrification.

While more people are beginning to understand the role of data in policing, less attention is paid to data-driven policingʼs relationship to land. This report studies that relationship with a focus on the process that has always bound policing and capitalism together: colonization. The report also examines the evolution of datadriven policing, including through LAPDʼs new Data-Informed CommunityFocused Policing, which combines data-mining and surveillance with the reformist notions of “community policing” and “police accountability.” This report is intended to frame an organizing agenda against this new program and beyond.

This essay is part of the ongoing “AI Lexicon” project, a call for contributions to generate alternate narratives, positionalities, and understandings to the better known and widely circulated ways of talking about artificial intelligence (AI).