Black Agenda Report
Black Agenda Report
News, commentary and analysis from the black left.

  • Home
  • Africa
  • African America
  • Education
  • Environment
  • International
  • Media and Culture
  • Political Economy
  • Radio
  • US Politics
  • War and Empire
  • omnibus

Automating Banishment: The Surveillance and Policing of Looted Land, a New Report from the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition
Stop LAPD Spying Coalition
26 Jan 2022
Automating Banishment: The Surveillance and Policing of Looted Land, a New Report from the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition
LAPD Photo credit: Mario Anzuoni/Reuters

Surveillance is an integral part of policing in this country. The Stop LAPD Spying Coalition report, Automating Banishment: the Surveillance and Policing of Looted Land, details the history of these abuses in Los Angeles.

The Stop LAPD Spying Coalition is a community group rooted in the Skid Row community on Tongva/Gabrielino land, stolen territory known as Los Angeles. Over the past decade, we have been working to build power to abolish LAPD surveillance. This report grew out of that organizing and examines the relationships of policing and surveillance to displacement, gentrification, and real estate development. We study those relationships with a focus on the process that has always bound policing and capitalism together: colonization.

We often hear that police are an occupying army in our communities. Throughout the history of imperialism and colonization, occupying forces have used surveillance to monitor and contain populations they deem threatening, all for the purpose of maintaining their violent rule. LAPD’s use of surveillance and data-driven policing must be understood from that perspective.

While more and more people are beginning to understand the role of data in policing, less attention is paid to data-driven policing’s relationship to land. Our exploration of that connection began as we were researching whether algorithmically generated “predictive” policing “hot spots” had a role in LAPD’s murder of Skid Row resident Charley "Africa" Kuenang. That research uncovered an ecology of institutions who inform police violence, including real estate developers, advocacy nonprofits, academic researchers, and the U.S. military. All those institutions show up in the pages that follow.

At the same time that we began researching data-driven policing’s relationship to land, our organizing efforts succeeded in securing the country’s first public hearings on data-driven policing as well as dismantling LAPD’s first-generation of predictive policing programs, Operation LASER (ended in April 2019) and PredPol (ended in April 2020). Those programs are explained in detail below, using records we obtained and analyzed after the programs ended. But the analysis in this report is by no means only backward-looking or historical. The same month LAPD ended PredPol, it launched Data-Informed Community-Focused Policing, a new policing framework that embeds data and surveillance into everything LAPD does.

The storytelling and analysis in this report is intended to frame organizing against this new program and beyond. Our purpose is to inform that fight, helping build intersectional coalitions across communities harmed by this policing. The report also examines the role of police “reform” in repackaging the violence of Operation LASER and PredPol. Studying the history, ecology, and evolution of these programs helps expose the harms at their root.

Modern policing incorporates tactics honed during ongoing settler colonialism, genocide, and enslavement. LAPD fuses military counterinsurgency methods with the anti-Black subordination of “broken windows” policing, stop-and-frisk, the “zero tolerance” Safer Cities Initiative in Skid Row, the Suspicious Activity Reporting spy program, Metro Units “proactively” hunting people across South Central, and gang injunctions and databases. “Predictive” and “data-driven” policing are the latest form of those harms. The purposes remain the same: speculatively criminalizing our identities, banishing us from our homes, and gathering “intelligence” to control us.

Data-mining supercharges the violence of policing, enabling deep coordination between those who seek to criminalize our communities, to transform land, and to displace and banish our people. Data-driven policing also obfuscates the purpose of this violence, hiding it behind a veneer of science and objectivity. Sometimes the purpose is banishment: removing us from our homes and communities. Sometimes it’s containment: restricting us from the areas police want to secure for gentrification. Sometimes it’s blight: targeting areas for neglect in order to maintain racial and class hierarchies. Sometimes it's extraction: exploiting our wealth, labor, or resources. And sometimes it’s elimination: killing or incarcerating our people. Whatever the purpose, what links these practices is the process of conquest.

LAPD’s tactics and technologies today extend those various purposes. Predictive policing programs serve as tools of racial terror, ethnic cleansing, and containment. LAPD’s role as an enforcement arm of landlords, developers, and other property owners is analogous to the role of the U.S. military in the era of genocidal western expansion. And “community policing” programs apply counterinsurgency tactics that have been used to suppress resistance and cultivate false legitimacy in imperial occupations. Throughout those examples, Los Angeles can be seen as a garrison state, with police testing new forms of surveillance and harm on our people.

These examples of course have resonance beyond Los Angeles too. As we were researching this report, the 2020 murder of Breonna Taylor by police in Louisville, Kentucky, exposed similar connections between real estate investment, surveillance, and policing. The police raid that killed Breonna Taylor was part of a “Place-Based Investigation” program used to banish Black residents in gentrifying areas. This killing shows how both “offender-based” and “location-based” surveillance policing tactics carry out the goals of elimination in the service of private capital.

Here in Los Angeles too, surveillance strategies advance the banishment, containment, blight, extraction, and elimination that are characteristic of conquest and colonialism. And here too, these tactics are deadly.

LAPD
Militarized Police
Police Abolition

Do you need and appreciate Black Agenda Report articles. Please click on the DONATE icon, and help us out, if you can.


Related Stories

Tunde Osazua
Surveilled and Controlled: The High-Tech War on Working Class Black Atlantans
20 November 2024
Under the shield of public safety, Atlanta's police and political leaders have turned it into the most surveilled city in the country, where Bl
​​​​​​​ Ajamu Baraka, BAR editor and columnist , Margaret Kimberley, BAR Executive Editor and Senior Columnist
Race, Rights and Repression: The Moral and Political Dilemma of the Capitalist Dictatorship
04 September 2024
BAR Executive Editor Margaret Kimberley talks to Ajamu Baraka, BAR Editor and Columnist about the upcoming presidential election and how the ou
Natasha Lennard
New York Spends $225 Million on Its Own “Cop City” — to Make the Whole City Run on Cops
12 June 2024
A proposed New York training facility shows how establishment politicians only understand governance through policing.
Dhoruba bin-Wahad
Rise of Militarized Policing in Response to Black Dissent
08 May 2024
The United States continues to grow the police state to serve as a bulwark of counterinsurgency.
A police tactical vehicle leaves the scene with officers in fatigues hanging on
Black Alliance For Peace
Black Alliance for Peace Baltimore Says No to Cop City
10 October 2023
The phenomenon of militarized policing is not confined to the city of Atlanta.
BAR Book Forum: Celeste Winston’s Book “How to Lose the Hounds”
Roberto Sirvent, BAR Book Forum Editor
BAR Book Forum: Celeste Winston’s Book “How to Lose the Hounds”
20 September 2023
In this series, we ask acclaimed authors to answer five questions about their book.
Little Rock Antioch’s RICO blu klux klan
Raymond Nat Turner, BAR poet-in-residence
Little Rock Antioch’s RICO blu klux klan
06 September 2023
Little Rock Antioch’s RICO blu klux klan (For Franklin, the Families, and Antioch’s Fightback)
State Repression Targets the Stop Cop City Movement
Margaret Kimberley, BAR Executive Editor and Senior Columnist
State Repression Targets the Stop Cop City Movement
07 June 2023
Cop City is an effort to ensure that state violence will bring the most draconian methods to bear against Black people.
Cop City Kills Before It Opens
Margaret Kimberley, BAR Executive Editor and Senior Columnist
Cop City Kills Before It Opens
25 January 2023
What could possibly go wrong with a $90 million, 85-acre police training ground that the community doesn't want?
Protesting for Jayland Walker
Margaret Kimberley, BAR Executive Editor and Senior Columnist
Protesting for Jayland Walker
06 July 2022
The number of bullets used to kill Jayland Walker have sparked an outcry, but police kill one Black person every day in this country.

More Stories


  • BAR Radio Logo
    Black Agenda Radio with Margaret Kimberley
    Black Agenda Radio May 9, 2025
    09 May 2025
    In this week’s segment, we discuss the 80th anniversary of victory in Europe in World War II, and the disinformation that centers on the U.S.'s role and dismisses the pivotal Soviet role in that…
  • Book: The Rebirth of the African Phoenix
    Black Agenda Radio with Margaret Kimberley
    The Rebirth of the African Phoenix: A View from Babylon
    09 May 2025
    Roger McKenzie is the international editor of the UK-based Morning Star, the only English-language socialist daily newspaper in the world. He joins us from Oxford to discuss his new book, “The…
  • ww2
    Black Agenda Radio with Margaret Kimberley
    Bruce Dixon: US Fake History of World War II Underlies Permanent Bipartisan Hostility Toward Russia
    09 May 2025
    The late Bruce Dixon was a co-founder and managing editor of Black Agenda Report. In 2018, he provided this commentary entitled, "US Fake History of World War II Underlies Permanent Bipartisan…
  • Nakba
    Black Agenda Radio with Margaret Kimberley
    The Meaning of Nakba Day
    09 May 2025
    Nadiah Alyafai is a member of the US Palestinian Community Network chapter in Chicago and she joins us to discuss why the public must be aware of the Nakba and the continuity of Palestinian…
  • Margaret Kimberley, BAR Executive Editor and Senior Columnist
    Ryan Coogler, Shedeur Sanders, Karmelo Anthony, and Rodney Hinton, Jr
    07 May 2025
    Black people who are among the rich and famous garner praise and love, and so do those who are in distress. But concerns for the masses of people and their struggles are often missing.
  • Load More
Subscribe
connect with us
about us
contact us