![]() Officers were instructed to fill out the field interview cards with as much information as possible every time they stopped someone. ![]() Relying on information collected in field cards (the interview cards officers are required to fill out when stopping someone) to help identify chronic offenders or areas that needed more patrolling, for example, meant that even random stops could mark a person as a potential suspect or make them subject to more surveillance. In 2019, the LAPD inspector general, Mark Smith, said the criteria used in the program to identify people likely to commit violent crimes were inconsistent.ĭocuments included in the Stop LAPD Spying report, as well as documents that had previously been made public, confirm that Operation Laser in some cases was all but precise. “When police target an area it generates more crime reports, arrests, and stops at that location and the subsequent crime data will lead the algorithm, risk assessment, or data analytic tool to direct police back to the same area,” the Stop LAPD Spying report explains. The software, controversial for aiding US Immigration and Customs Enforcement in surveilling immigrants, made it easier and faster for the department to create chronic offender bulletins and put together information from various sources on people deemed suspicious or inclined to commit a crime, Uchida said.īut the picture of crime in LA the software drew up was based on calls for service, crime reports and information collected by officers, the documents show, creating a vicious loop. Information collected during these policing efforts was again fed into computer software that further helped automate the department’s crime-prediction efforts.Ĭentral to Operation Laser’s success, wrote Craig Uchida, the program’s architect at LAPD, in a research paper in 2012, was Palantir. A newly established group, the crime intelligence detail, worked to create chronic offender bulletins, assigning criminal risk scores to people based on arrest records, gang affiliation, probation and field interviews. Operation Laser used historical information such as data on gun-related crimes, arrests, and calls to map out “problem areas” (called “laser zones”) and “points of interest” (called “anchor points”) for officers to focus their efforts on. Activists protest outside the Palantir Technologies software company in 2019. ![]()
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