RS: But you know, the irony is we've been there before, before high tech, before the incident, and you mentioned COINTELPRO. We know the LAPD had a red squad that went after any trade unionists, any protests, any peace person. There's a long history of that sort of thing. However, now it's made more ominous because you have high tech, you can get every single phone call, you can get all this data, right? That's what this new Orwellian society is all about. This LASER program which regards some of our people living here, maybe many of them as tumors to be eradicated, that's a nationally funded program by an organization, the CIA, that's not supposed to be involved in our domestic lives. That's against the law. Okay.
And yet you have these wonderful liberal folks on our city council down here in LA and our state government and everything saying, "Oh yeah, let's do it, prevent the policing. That's great." No, that's spying, that's gathering all the information you can on the people that live here and then you single out the ones you don't like for whatever reason. And you go after them. I'll give you the last words, but I mean this is kind of a backwards way to do it I didn't give you a proper introduction, but I am so inspired by this work that you're doing. I want to know more about your story. So how'd you get into this? Let's end on that. What motivated you? Why are you doing this? Who are you?
JG: Well, I'm a full time registered nurse. I work in the community of Boyle Heights. I started in the coalition and late 2011 towards the end of 2011 and I was actually active in The Occupy movement. I was helping to run the medical tent. The coalition did a teaching right next to the medical tent and I sat down and I started to listen in on what suspicious activity reporting is and I realized that not only was I a target, but it started to be very clear to me. And I think this is what the work of the coalition does, is it breaks down what does a police state look like. Let's get into the specifics. Let's talk about what they're really doing and I think that's what we don't do in our communities is we don't talk about really how is the police functioning. We just assume like a public utility that they're doing their job, they're providing us water or food or safety. And I think that is what will help open our eyes to how harmful policing isn't our lives.
One thing I want to leave communities with, because I think when we hear this stuff, it becomes very overwhelming we feel kind of like how do we fight back. And one thing that we've been really talking about and how we fight back is the preservation of our narrative, the preservation of our story, the preservation of our lives, who we are and its entirety. And the thing that's very misleading about data, it's really the decontextualization of who we are by breaking us up into these little data points. There's this assumption that neutrality, objectivity will occur. But once you break us up into data points, all the nuances that make us who we are, why we are where we're at in our lives, where we've come from, where we want to be, get completely extracted or completely erased. But when in the hands of LAPD, that data gets reconstructive through the lens of criminalization.
So I leave communities with just remembering that it's our stories that we have to preserve. It's our stories that we have to tell. It's our voices that have to tell those stories because that's how we will fight back because, yes, it's about surveillance. It's about spying, but it's really about trying to find a way to criminalize us. Find a way to make our lifestyles criminal, whether it's racism, sexism, ableism, it's how can we criminalize those things that are different? How do we take that story away and reconstruct it through a lens of criminalization? And that's essentially what LAPD is doing.
RS: That's it for this edition of "Scheer Intelligence." Our producers are Joshua, Scheer and Isabel Carreon. Our engineers are Kat Yore and Mario Diaz at KCRW and here at the Annenberg School of communication and journalism it's Sebastian Grubaugh. See you next week with another edition of "Scheer Intelligence."
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