When we bring in pre-operational planning, we think of the idea that someone is thinking about doing something. So that's essentially the kind of legal framework that the suspicious activity reporting program set up. Now after the post-9/11 commission kind of came out with this desire to stop things before they happened they passed the Intelligence Reformed Terrorism Prevention Act which mandated the president to create what's called the information sharing environment. That was essentially an environment where data can be shared through multiple agencies -- local, state, and federal law enforcement agencies.
So again now there's the concept of data sharing, and along with data analytics. So when we ground predictive policing and those things we see that predictive policing is part of a larger architecture of surveillance. It's part of a larger information sharing environment. So LAPD has two programs that you mentioned, PredPol and Operation LASER, which stands for LA Strategic Extraction and Restoration.
RS: Let me just stop for a minute. I mean the irony here is this is the old thing that happened with the Roman Empire, you know. You go conquer the world and you end up conquering your own people. And really, what you're talking about is something really bizarre. You're talking about an activity that was supposed to be aimed at getting terrorists who first of all, 15 of the 19 hijackers came from Saudi Arabia, they didn't come from South Central LA. And you've got this specter of the foreign terrorists. And then you're going to look for them in your own community. That gets conflated with gangs in LA. It gets conflated with common criminals and so forth. You end up getting all this federal money. These two programs by the way, the LASER program comes out of Palantir. People don't know, you know, the CIA funded that organization.
Now in community after community in this country, Palantir, a CIA-funded organization. CIA is not supposed to be involved in spying within this country. Nonetheless they can start through an operation they had called In-Q-Tel and the start this group and now they're in almost every police department including here where we're talking about it, in Los Angeles, very secretive operation. You can't go and observe it or anything. What are they doing? They're mining the data collected by the 17 national intelligence agencies, the NSA, the CIA, the FBI and everything conflating it with local police reports. And they can go stop people and what they're doing is targeting our poorest communities, communities minority, black and brown. They're using all of this stuff that was designed to get hijackers from Saudi Arabia's own place and they're using it against what? 16-year-old running around South Central.
JG: Yeah, and I think that's the interesting thing and the historical context when we think about it because before Operation LASER there was Weed and Seed. And again, LASER stands for LA Strategic Extraction and Restoration. When they talk about the program they say that there are tumors in our community that must be extracted. And with laser-like precision, like a surgeon, that they'll extract these people or places from the community and restore the community. Well that's nothing new. LAPD has been doing that; that was Weed and Seed. Take out the weeds and seed something new. These things have always had an intent to cause harm in the community. The thing with the LASER program is not only it's the targeting of people, but it's also the targeting of their homes.
That's one thing that LAPD doesn't talk about is that the program specifically states find these people that they target, which are called "chronic offenders." Stop them, harass them, violate them if you can and there's always back up chronic offenders for LAPD to use if one comes into custody or one person is pushed out of the community. Now when it comes to targeting of homes, and again I talk about the intent to cause harm is that the LASER zones that they set up through this program, within them there's things that are called anchor points. Where they find homes that they want to target and they want to evict or work with the citywide nuisance abatement program to actually slap at state injunction and get properties turned over from owners so that the state is controlling it. Installing surveillance equipment, evicting certain individuals.
RS: If I could just stop you for a minute, I mean I just want to ... There's something so weirdly Orwellian about this and the use of language and what have you. It masks the absurdity of it. Because as far as I know there's no evidence of gang kids or gang people in Los Angeles being hijackers of airplanes that blow up the World Trade Center. This is technology that was developed in Iraq and Afghanistan. To get ISIS, to get terrorists of, and so forth. Then somehow it's made available to local police departments free of charge, taxpayers pay for it. Federal money goes into it and then some companies get really super wealthy. People become billionaires as a result and why are you looking at gangs in LA if you're trying to get international terrorists? What is the connection between the Bloods the Crips and ISIS? There is no connection. What there is is a connection of the military industrial complex. You can make a lot of money saying, "Hey, we're going to use this new technology and go after these people."
JG: That point is really important because when Jeff Brantingham, co-creator of PredPol, when started to bring this information to create PredPol, there's a picture that he has in a slide where he's talking about predictive analytics. He shows a picture of Afghani men and a picture of Latino youth, side by side, one being the international terrorist, and one being what you would call a domestic terrorist. Now when we think about how we're being policed, there was ... LASER program we always say that it's a tactic that's old. When we think about gang injunctions and gang databases, LASER uses LASER zones and chronic offender bulletins. So very similar, but the nature of the language is changing, and I think that's the point that's really important because there's been a lot of strides where people have said gang databases are harmful to people. There's one year olds on the Cal Gang Database that have been self-proclaimed gang members that aren't even able to speak in deciding that they're gang members. So very flawed policing tactics.
In a way to legitimize themselves, to keep targeting the same communities that have always been targeted, black, brown, and poor communities, they have to change the language. That's one thing that we're really starting to uplift. For example now in schools, there's a program called preventing violent extremism, where they're trying to predict who will be the next possible shooter in a school. But instead of speaking in languages of like, this is a gang member, or this is going to be a problem child, they use violent extremists, which is kind of coming from that same terminology when we think about terrorists, when we think about terrorism, we think about these extremists.
So a lot of policing is changing the way that it describes itself, to sterilize itself, to make it seem like it's race neutral, to make it seem like it's unbiased, and data has a big role in that because most people think that data is neutral. Most people think that if it's scientific, then it has to be right, but we have to kind of go back and look at what's actually being criminalized, who's actually being criminalized, and who's collecting this data, for what purpose are they collecting this data? How is this data being used? Can these questions of community safety actually be answered through an algorithm?
I think that's some of the bigger questions we have to ask ourselves as well, because so much technology and so much is moving with algorithms that we think it can solve every problem, but when we think about the problem of community safety, instead of the conditions that people are living under as being the problem, it's the person and it's the place that becomes the risk. It's the person and the place that becomes the target. It's the person and the place that gets extracted. Not poverty, not racism, not lack of schools, not lack of green spaces, not lack of grocery stores, none of those things become identified as the problem according to LAPD. I think those things are really important because again, it's driving while black was predictive policing. We look at predictive policing now, and data is a proxy for race.
RS: I see it more as a racket. Now, a racket can have terrible social consequences, a lot of people end up in jail, they get racially profiled, they get killed, not going to deny that. But I see this as an extension of the military industrial complex. 9/11 opened the floodgates. The Cold War was over, we didn't have a big enemy in the world, we were going to actually have a peace dividend, we were going to spend money on rebuilding our schools and making life better, and so forth. Then suddenly we had terrorism, and then we could get a lot of money to go fight terrorism. Then in order to spread it around, let's get the local police departments get in. What do they do?
The money comes pouring into city after city and this becomes policing, so we don't talk any longer about community policing, or reaching out to the community, or job training program, or inspiring youth. We don't talk about any of that. We talk about using this high tech world of [inaudible 00:14:33] predicting who's going to be a criminal or who's going to be a terrorist. In a way, it's terrorizing the community. I don't want to dignify it by assuming this makes sense logically as a way of stopping crime. I see this as a boondoggle to spend a lot of money, and it's a way of using that keyword that you used, "the other." I got to take a quick break and we'll back. I'm talking to Jamie Garcia who's with a group called Stop LAPD Spying Coalition.
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RS: We're back with my guest, Jamie Garcia, [inaudible 00:15:10] "Scheer Intelligence." So tell us more about predictive policing and what are you able to do about it. You've been able to get some documents, you've been able to file some lawsuits.
JG: Well we're really about community building, we're really about base building, we're really about community empowerment. This is definitely something that can't be resolved by an ordinance that says we want community control over surveillance. We want these programs abolished. We don't see this doing anything productive in our community. This is a long-term fight, we definitely want predictive policing, PredPol, and LASER dismantled, but that's on the long road towards abolition. That's definitely a longer conversation, but what we did in May of 2017, the community came together and basically asked each other, what do we want to know about this program? We had one or two articles that let us know that LASER existed, that told us a little bit about it. So we literally all sat together, our headquarters is at Los Angeles Community Action Network, we're based in Skid Row, so community members from Skid Row, from different areas in Los Angeles came together and wrote a public records request.
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