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Unless there is an equivalent LAPD initiative that uploads the pictures of law-abiding citizens with names and other identifying info to the public web, there w

Unless there is an equivalent LAPD initiative that uploads the pictures of law-abiding citizens with names and other identifying info to the public web, there will be suspicions that this is an anti-police (rather than anti-police-surveillance-abuse) measure intended to intimidate and obstruct police work. Neither is it clear how representative the organizers are of those law-abiding citizens generally rather than a minority mix of genuine victims of police abuse and political agitators using them. Note this is not a criticism of representative community efforts to hold police forces to account for bad behaviour, but this particular approach seems to play an antagonistic role informed as much by political ideology as genuine concern about police overreach.

Reptur 4y ago
It is public information, this is just an interface to access it. Google LASD Gangs, we need more transparency, not less.
- kevviiinn 4y ago
  For reference https://knock-la.com/lasd-gangs-little-devils-wayside-whities-cavemen-vikings/ https://knock-la.com/lasd-gangs-little-devils-wayside-whitie... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_LASD_deputy_gangs https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_LASD_deputy_gangs
flangola7 4y ago
By the lords above, beside, and below I am not going to pearl clutch and nitpick actions that disrupt police. They already have the systemic benefit of the doubt and so much more. If we start torturing their families on live camera then give me a page but until then.... I sleep.
alwayslikethis 4y ago
I wonder if it would be legal to use home surveillance cameras to identify police car license plates, facial recognition, to track individual police officers. Then you can have a good argument when you are trying to sue for illegal surveillance.
- heavyset_go 4y ago
  You could do one better with SDR units and use trilateration of police radios/radar to track them in real-time.
  - Arrath 4y ago
    All but the most rural police departments have long since moved to frequency hopping, encrypted radios thanks to DHS initiatives and funding, no? This also adds complexity to the task of triangulating them doesn't it?
    - jstarfish 4y ago
      At this point, there's so much tech emitting radio waves in the average police car you'd need bespoke methods to detect most of it. The stack and operational procedures change every 5-10 years too. They used to (~20 years ago?) drive around with active radar engaged so they could pull over speeders without having to stop and use the handheld unit, but this would broadcast their proximity to everybody with a radar detector as they drove around. Easy to triangulate with consumer hardware. With object-detection tech being commodity, it might be easier to just deploy RPi cameras and flag any vehicle with "POLICE" vinyls on the side. They out themselves there since no civilian is driving a similar vehicle. Undercover cars are a different matter. You'd have a hard time disambiguating service vehicles from civilian-owned. Most of those even retain the side-view spotlight. You could safely ignore any with "PRIVATE" or "SECURITY" written on the side though; the cops out themselves again since most departments don't buy slick-tops and then slap "POLICE" vinyls on it (though I think Georgia departments are compelled to do this; I've seen black vinyl lettering on black undercover cars which I assume was meant to skirt some law). Option B: most departments outsource maintenance of their vehicles to contracted civilian mechanics. Drive around town enough and you'll probably find a lot with a bunch of police cars parked there. Plant an ALPR camera facing the lot and record plates. Then you can use ALPR around town.
      - Arrath 4y ago
        Staking out the maintenance depot or department fleet yard is probably the most expedient solution to getting a database of the vehicles in the first place, you're absolutely right.
skinpop 4y ago
the very concept of the police is a form of political ideology.
- localplume 4y ago
  what an insane take. police has existed in every form of society and it is necessary for a civilized society to function. its like being against roads, or hospitals, or public transportation. the dichotomy of LA crime being out of control and LA people being so anti-cop will never fail to amuse me.
  - dymk 4y ago
    LA isn’t “out of control” because of a lack of police, certainly. Do you think cops prevent crime?
    - diordiderot 4y ago
      Well... To a certain extent they do. You're not gonna rob a store if there's a cop standing outside
      - drekk 4y ago
        I love that the American solution to fire is... fire? We tried putting grown-ups with guns in schools after Columbine, and somehow more guns hasn't solved the violence problem. I don't think putting a cop outside each store will stop theft, especially when wage theft alone represents a larger loss than all larcenies, burglaries, and auto theft combined. [0] > in the first 24 days of 2015, police in the US fatally shot more people than police did in England and Wales, combined, over the past 24 years [1] [0] https://www.tcworkerscenter.org/2018/09/wage-theft-vs-other-forms-of-theft-in-the-u-s/ https://www.tcworkerscenter.org/2018/09/wage-theft-vs-other-... [1] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/jun/09/the-counted-police-killings-us-vs-other-countries https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/jun/09/the-counted-...
        4y ago
jdgoesmarching 4y ago
They aren’t exactly shy about their goals: “This website is intended as a tool to empower community members engaged in copwatch and other countersurveillance practices. You can use it to identify officers who are causing harm in your community” “Political” is not the slur you think it is to activists. Ironically, the belief that good social action should be some sort of pure pragmatism unsullied by politics is itself a deeply embedded neoliberal ideology. Plenty of people are anti-police, for good reason, and that position is just as ideological as yours. It’s fair to debate that position, but it’s naive to view political agitation as some sort of sneaky sinister plot. I promise these people, least of all the “genuine victims”, aren’t concerned with whether their tactics fall outside the Overton window of centrist-approved police protests.
- systemvoltage 4y ago
  Anarchism is a political ideology though. OP is saying that there is much more than simply holding police abuse accountable.
  - kevviiinn 4y ago
    Where does anarchism come in? That seems like a pretty big leap in logic
autoexec 4y ago
> Unless there is an equivalent LAPD initiative that uploads the pictures of law-abiding citizens with names and other identifying info to the public web Isn't that what many mugshots are? It looks like LAPD at least doesn't dump them online like some places do, but even things like https://app5.lasd.org/iic/ https://app5.lasd.org/iic/ or https://www.lapdonline.org/office-of-the-chief-of-police/professional-standards-bureau/critical-incident-videos/ https://www.lapdonline.org/office-of-the-chief-of-police/pro... could be just as damaging unless records are pulled offline when people are later found to be totally innocent. I notice that news organizations are perfectly happy to post names, photos, and other information about suspects, but much less likely to publish information about police officers. I can't help but wonder if something like this watch the watchers site would even be seen as necessary if any search engine could do the job just as well.
atoav 4y ago
Police forces in many other nations can more or less be trusted to provide somewhat accurate data. When they don't, it often becomes a scandal. In the US them not providing accurate data seems more or less the rule. I once wanted to compare the numbers of bullets fired during service between different nations. There are nations where every single bullet that has been fired during service is accounted for and categorized whether ot was shot at a person, a warning shot, a shot at an animal and then there are areas where you won't even get a total number. If you are a law-abiding citizen that wants a good police force, accountability needs to happen. And it is totally appropriate for citizens to take this into their own hands if the police departments and the political powers can't manage to make it happen. If people see that the LAPD is caught lying about cases and numbers repeatedly without consequences, what other course of action is there? If I were a LAPD official I would see this as a sign that the public doesn't trust my numbers and I would try my best to figure out a way to change this. A police force is provided with great power. And with great power comes great responsibility. And that responsibility is not towards your colleagues who killed innocent people, but towards the public. If you are proven to be unable to act responsibly it is in order for the public to find measures to hold you responsible. This is — by nature — political, but I don't think it is divisive. A responsible police force should be in the interest of every political orientation, unless we are talking about authotarian or fascist movements — and then you got an entirely different set of problems, because they don't believe in the rule of law to begin with.
- smcl 4y ago
  > If I were a LAPD official I would see this as a sign that the public doesn't trust my numbers and I would try my best to figure out a way to change this I 100% believe you, and if I was an LAPD official I would feel the same way. However police themselves probably won’t react like this. I don’t think the existence of this tool in and of itself will scare them into behaving better - they’ll probably just try their best to work around it (take a more lenient position of hidden/obscured badge numbers, slow roll FOIA requests, idk), try to shut it down legally or harass the people behind it. Don’t get me wrong it’s a good tool to have at your disposal and I think it’ll probably still help some LA residents with cases against the LAPD somehow. disclaimer: I don't live in LA, have never interacted with the LAPD, have never even been there. This comment is purely based on the impression I get that some police in the USA are quite hostile towards their population and that the LAPD are one of the more notorious departments.
cs02rm0 4y ago
I don't know (I'm just a Brit watching from afar), but I'd assume the LAPD have databases full of information on citizens, of course not shared with the public web, only shared with police forces, mostly. The public web though is how citizens share information with each other, I'm not sure excluding police officers would make it better. Seeking an equivalence here also strikes me as a false equivalence - the power balance between an LAPD office and a citizen is not equal.
- MagicMoonlight 4y ago
  So how would you feel if there was a database of tech employees? Tech companies have absolute power over people’s lives and a huge amount of private information used for malicious purposes. Would you be happy if it said “Here are tim and james, here is where they live, make them accountable!”?
  - haswell 4y ago
    > Tech companies have absolute power over people’s lives The kind of power wielded by tech companies is not the same kind of power wielded by the police. Comparing them directly in this way runs into some major false equivalence problems. I still see major potential for abuse of such a database and I’m not claiming it is without issue. But logging an interaction with an armed public servant who has the power to detain/arrest you, who works for an organization that has a worrisome tendency towards shooting civilians, and whose role is to be a sworn servant and protector of the public - cannot be casually compared with some vague notion of “big tech has your data”. For sale of argument, if we did dignify that comparison, the first problem is that the vast majority of workers in tech have no such power at all. The rank and file are generally powerless. Opportunities for abuse are generally concentrated to a small number of people with access. The same cannot be said about the police force.
    - briandear 4y ago
      A tendency towards shooting civilians? Here’s every officer involved shooting in Los Angeles for 2022: https://da.lacounty.gov/reports/ois/2022 https://da.lacounty.gov/reports/ois/2022 When reading the reports it seems that those shootings were not unreasonable given the circumstances.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
PennRobotics 4y ago
There's a power dynamic. Why should we have public sites like Rate My Professors but professors can't have a public Rate My Students?

Reptur 4y ago

It is public information, this is just an interface to access it. Google LASD Gangs, we need more transparency, not less.

kevviiinn 4y ago
For reference https://knock-la.com/lasd-gangs-little-devils-wayside-whities-cavemen-vikings/ https://knock-la.com/lasd-gangs-little-devils-wayside-whitie... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_LASD_deputy_gangs https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_LASD_deputy_gangs

flangola7 4y ago

By the lords above, beside, and below I am not going to pearl clutch and nitpick actions that disrupt police. They already have the systemic benefit of the doubt and so much more. If we start torturing their families on live camera then give me a page but until then.... I sleep.

alwayslikethis 4y ago

I wonder if it would be legal to use home surveillance cameras to identify police car license plates, facial recognition, to track individual police officers. Then you can have a good argument when you are trying to sue for illegal surveillance.

heavyset_go 4y ago
You could do one better with SDR units and use trilateration of police radios/radar to track them in real-time.
- Arrath 4y ago
  All but the most rural police departments have long since moved to frequency hopping, encrypted radios thanks to DHS initiatives and funding, no? This also adds complexity to the task of triangulating them doesn't it?
  - jstarfish 4y ago
    At this point, there's so much tech emitting radio waves in the average police car you'd need bespoke methods to detect most of it. The stack and operational procedures change every 5-10 years too. They used to (~20 years ago?) drive around with active radar engaged so they could pull over speeders without having to stop and use the handheld unit, but this would broadcast their proximity to everybody with a radar detector as they drove around. Easy to triangulate with consumer hardware. With object-detection tech being commodity, it might be easier to just deploy RPi cameras and flag any vehicle with "POLICE" vinyls on the side. They out themselves there since no civilian is driving a similar vehicle. Undercover cars are a different matter. You'd have a hard time disambiguating service vehicles from civilian-owned. Most of those even retain the side-view spotlight. You could safely ignore any with "PRIVATE" or "SECURITY" written on the side though; the cops out themselves again since most departments don't buy slick-tops and then slap "POLICE" vinyls on it (though I think Georgia departments are compelled to do this; I've seen black vinyl lettering on black undercover cars which I assume was meant to skirt some law). Option B: most departments outsource maintenance of their vehicles to contracted civilian mechanics. Drive around town enough and you'll probably find a lot with a bunch of police cars parked there. Plant an ALPR camera facing the lot and record plates. Then you can use ALPR around town.
    - Arrath 4y ago
      Staking out the maintenance depot or department fleet yard is probably the most expedient solution to getting a database of the vehicles in the first place, you're absolutely right.

skinpop 4y ago

the very concept of the police is a form of political ideology.

localplume 4y ago
what an insane take. police has existed in every form of society and it is necessary for a civilized society to function. its like being against roads, or hospitals, or public transportation. the dichotomy of LA crime being out of control and LA people being so anti-cop will never fail to amuse me.
- dymk 4y ago
  LA isn’t “out of control” because of a lack of police, certainly. Do you think cops prevent crime?
  - diordiderot 4y ago
    Well... To a certain extent they do. You're not gonna rob a store if there's a cop standing outside
    - drekk 4y ago
      I love that the American solution to fire is... fire? We tried putting grown-ups with guns in schools after Columbine, and somehow more guns hasn't solved the violence problem. I don't think putting a cop outside each store will stop theft, especially when wage theft alone represents a larger loss than all larcenies, burglaries, and auto theft combined. [0] > in the first 24 days of 2015, police in the US fatally shot more people than police did in England and Wales, combined, over the past 24 years [1] [0] https://www.tcworkerscenter.org/2018/09/wage-theft-vs-other-forms-of-theft-in-the-u-s/ https://www.tcworkerscenter.org/2018/09/wage-theft-vs-other-... [1] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/jun/09/the-counted-police-killings-us-vs-other-countries https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/jun/09/the-counted-...
      - 4y ago

jdgoesmarching 4y ago

They aren’t exactly shy about their goals: “This website is intended as a tool to empower community members engaged in copwatch and other countersurveillance practices. You can use it to identify officers who are causing harm in your community” “Political” is not the slur you think it is to activists. Ironically, the belief that good social action should be some sort of pure pragmatism unsullied by politics is itself a deeply embedded neoliberal ideology. Plenty of people are anti-police, for good reason, and that position is just as ideological as yours. It’s fair to debate that position, but it’s naive to view political agitation as some sort of sneaky sinister plot. I promise these people, least of all the “genuine victims”, aren’t concerned with whether their tactics fall outside the Overton window of centrist-approved police protests.

systemvoltage 4y ago
Anarchism is a political ideology though. OP is saying that there is much more than simply holding police abuse accountable.
- kevviiinn 4y ago
  Where does anarchism come in? That seems like a pretty big leap in logic

autoexec 4y ago

> Unless there is an equivalent LAPD initiative that uploads the pictures of law-abiding citizens with names and other identifying info to the public web Isn't that what many mugshots are? It looks like LAPD at least doesn't dump them online like some places do, but even things like https://app5.lasd.org/iic/ https://app5.lasd.org/iic/ or https://www.lapdonline.org/office-of-the-chief-of-police/professional-standards-bureau/critical-incident-videos/ https://www.lapdonline.org/office-of-the-chief-of-police/pro... could be just as damaging unless records are pulled offline when people are later found to be totally innocent. I notice that news organizations are perfectly happy to post names, photos, and other information about suspects, but much less likely to publish information about police officers. I can't help but wonder if something like this watch the watchers site would even be seen as necessary if any search engine could do the job just as well.

atoav 4y ago

Police forces in many other nations can more or less be trusted to provide somewhat accurate data. When they don't, it often becomes a scandal. In the US them not providing accurate data seems more or less the rule. I once wanted to compare the numbers of bullets fired during service between different nations. There are nations where every single bullet that has been fired during service is accounted for and categorized whether ot was shot at a person, a warning shot, a shot at an animal and then there are areas where you won't even get a total number. If you are a law-abiding citizen that wants a good police force, accountability needs to happen. And it is totally appropriate for citizens to take this into their own hands if the police departments and the political powers can't manage to make it happen. If people see that the LAPD is caught lying about cases and numbers repeatedly without consequences, what other course of action is there? If I were a LAPD official I would see this as a sign that the public doesn't trust my numbers and I would try my best to figure out a way to change this. A police force is provided with great power. And with great power comes great responsibility. And that responsibility is not towards your colleagues who killed innocent people, but towards the public. If you are proven to be unable to act responsibly it is in order for the public to find measures to hold you responsible. This is — by nature — political, but I don't think it is divisive. A responsible police force should be in the interest of every political orientation, unless we are talking about authotarian or fascist movements — and then you got an entirely different set of problems, because they don't believe in the rule of law to begin with.

smcl 4y ago
> If I were a LAPD official I would see this as a sign that the public doesn't trust my numbers and I would try my best to figure out a way to change this I 100% believe you, and if I was an LAPD official I would feel the same way. However police themselves probably won’t react like this. I don’t think the existence of this tool in and of itself will scare them into behaving better - they’ll probably just try their best to work around it (take a more lenient position of hidden/obscured badge numbers, slow roll FOIA requests, idk), try to shut it down legally or harass the people behind it. Don’t get me wrong it’s a good tool to have at your disposal and I think it’ll probably still help some LA residents with cases against the LAPD somehow. disclaimer: I don't live in LA, have never interacted with the LAPD, have never even been there. This comment is purely based on the impression I get that some police in the USA are quite hostile towards their population and that the LAPD are one of the more notorious departments.

cs02rm0 4y ago

I don't know (I'm just a Brit watching from afar), but I'd assume the LAPD have databases full of information on citizens, of course not shared with the public web, only shared with police forces, mostly. The public web though is how citizens share information with each other, I'm not sure excluding police officers would make it better. Seeking an equivalence here also strikes me as a false equivalence - the power balance between an LAPD office and a citizen is not equal.

MagicMoonlight 4y ago
So how would you feel if there was a database of tech employees? Tech companies have absolute power over people’s lives and a huge amount of private information used for malicious purposes. Would you be happy if it said “Here are tim and james, here is where they live, make them accountable!”?
- haswell 4y ago
  > Tech companies have absolute power over people’s lives The kind of power wielded by tech companies is not the same kind of power wielded by the police. Comparing them directly in this way runs into some major false equivalence problems. I still see major potential for abuse of such a database and I’m not claiming it is without issue. But logging an interaction with an armed public servant who has the power to detain/arrest you, who works for an organization that has a worrisome tendency towards shooting civilians, and whose role is to be a sworn servant and protector of the public - cannot be casually compared with some vague notion of “big tech has your data”. For sale of argument, if we did dignify that comparison, the first problem is that the vast majority of workers in tech have no such power at all. The rank and file are generally powerless. Opportunities for abuse are generally concentrated to a small number of people with access. The same cannot be said about the police force.
  - briandear 4y ago
    A tendency towards shooting civilians? Here’s every officer involved shooting in Los Angeles for 2022: https://da.lacounty.gov/reports/ois/2022 https://da.lacounty.gov/reports/ois/2022 When reading the reports it seems that those shootings were not unreasonable given the circumstances.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

PennRobotics 4y ago

There's a power dynamic. Why should we have public sites like Rate My Professors but professors can't have a public Rate My Students?