After Years Of Claiming It Doesn't Use Facial Recognition Software, The LAPD Admits It Has Used It 30,000 Times Since 2009

from the we-regret-the-repeated-errors dept

The Los Angeles Police Department apparently loves using facial recognition tech. It doesn't like talking about its love for this tech, though. It told the Georgetown Law Center on Privacy and Technology it had nothing to give the Center when it asked for its facial recognition tech documents.

The Los Angeles Police Department has repeatedly announced new face recognition initiatives—including a “smart car” equipped with face recognition and real-time face recognition cameras—yet the agency claimed to have “no records responsive” to our document request.

The LAPD flatly denied using the tech as recently as 2019.

"We actually do not use facial recognition in the Department," Rubenstein told the LA Times in 2019, adding an exception of "a few limited instances" where outside agencies used it during joint investigations.

Here's what the LA Times has discovered, thanks to public records that the LAPD finally decided to stop withholding.

The Los Angeles Police Department has used facial recognition software nearly 30,000 times since 2009, with hundreds of officers running images of suspects from surveillance cameras and other sources against a massive database of mug shots taken by law enforcement.

The new figures, released to The Times, reveal for the first time how commonly facial recognition is used in the department, which for years has provided vague and contradictory information about how and whether it uses the technology.

There's some technically true stuff in the LAPD's obfuscation. The LAPD does not have its own software. This makes it easier to claim it does not use the tech "in the Department." But the Department definitely uses the tech. The LAPD has direct access to the software owned by the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department, something it uses thousands of times every year.

Despite this disclosure, the LAPD refuses to admit it misled the public in the past about its reliance on the tech.

LAPD Assistant Chief Horace Frank said “it is no secret” that the LAPD uses facial recognition, that he personally testified to that fact before the Police Commission a couple years ago, and that the more recent denials — including two since last year, one to The Times — were just mistakes.

When a citizen misleads a cop, it's obstruction. When cops mislead the public, it's just an honest mistake. But the reality of the situation is this: more than 300 officers have access to the database which contains 9 million photos. And the software the Sheriff's Department uses is run by Dataworks, which made news recently for being instrumental in two false arrests predicated on facial recognition searches run on its platform.

Now that the LAPD can't continue pretending it doesn't use facial recognition tech, it's begun issuing statements correcting its earlier "mistakes." The group of people receiving corrections include public records requesters who were previously issued flat denials about the LAPD's use of the tech. Now that the PD's reliance on facial recognition is out in the open, maybe Los Angeles legislators can finally get around to regulating government use of the unreliable tech.

Filed Under: 4th amendment, facial recognition, lapd, surveillance

Palantir Presentations Show How The LAPD Is Able To Turn Tons Of Garbage Data Into Ineffective Policing

from the money-for-nothing dept

Palantir is raking in millions. It's your surveillance provider, whether you -- the valued customer target -- had any say in the matter or not. Data comes in from all over and Palantir helps law enforcement make sense of it. Haystacks are useless. "Drilling down" -- to use official Palantir parlance -- is everything. Whether it's ICE or your local PD, Palantir is turning data into arrests… or at least stops/frisks and low-level harassment.

Palantir gives law enforcement something roughly aligned with predictive policing. Predictive policing has given itself a bad name over the years by relying on dirty data supplied by cops who target minorities under the bigoted assumption that that's where the crime is. Palantir doesn't use that term but its analytics provide the same outcome: garbage results from garbage data.

And there's oh so much data. Everything cops own gets fed into the system: millions of license plate photos from ALPRs, every piece of detritus generated by police reports, gang databases that think residents are gang members because they happen to live in gang territory, etc. And it adds in everything else: state license plate databases, regional crime center reports, the bullshit crafted by DHS-led "fusion centers." Everything goes in and Palantir helps craft what comes out.

Documents obtained by BuzzFeed show how much crafting Palantir does and how much minute detail its software allows officers to fiddle with. It's not cheap, but agencies like the Los Angeles Police Department feel it's worth it.

Palantir is expensive, and police departments often struggle to afford it. Between 2015 and 2016, the LA Mayor’s Office of Public Safety got the money to pay for Palantir from the federal government — specifically, from the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s Urban Areas Security Initiative (UASI) Program, which gives cities technology to "prevent, protect against, mitigate, respond to, and recover from acts of terrorism."

It’s unclear if the LAPD always used federal UASI money to pay for Palantir, or if it only used federal money in those years. But purchase orders show that Palantir software upgrades and user licenses cost hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars.

Do law enforcement agencies get what they pay for? Well, that depends on who you ask. The LAPD thinks it's a sound investment. Critics say it's nothing more than the public paying their public servants to spy on them in granular detail. Whatever it is, it's profitable for Palantir and very, very popular within the LAPD.

Palantir is no small thing within the LAPD. Almost 5,000 people, more than half of all LAPD officers had accounts on Palantir, according to an “LAPD Palantir Usage Metrics” document. The same document says that in 2016, those officers ran 60,000 searches in support of more than 10,000 cases.

Starting with little more than an alias or a distinctive tattoo, LAPD officers can begin rebuilding a person's life as compiled by the Department's numerous data inputs. Searching by sex, race, and distinctive markings, officers running searches can access names, email addresses, warrants, mugshots, physical addresses, personal relationships, employers, and anything else that may get swept into the mix.

Here's a very broad overview of how it works:

For the LAPD, Palantir swallowed up the contents of several major databases that were previously spread across public safety agencies throughout Los Angeles and the state, including incident reports, arrests, citations, license plate reader data, field interviews, recovered vehicles, warrants, booking photos, and data from the California Law Enforcement Telecommunications System, and the county’s Community Health Services data. Palantir algorithmically organizes this data, determining possible links between the people within it (e.g., “Sally was interviewed by police in a report about Fred”) and makes it searchable.

But is all this data getting the job done? The LAPD has been using Palantir's software for more than a decade. The Department killed off its predictive policing software earlier this year, citing its cost. But it could have just as easily cited its inability to do much more than subject overly-harassed residents to more harassment by mistaking past crime results for future criminal activity.

What about Palantir? Its decade at the LAPD doesn't appear to have had much of an impact. Violent crime rates in 2019 are about the same as they were in 2009. While homicide and robbery have declined slightly, aggravated assault has increased. (So have the number of rapes reported, but that may have more to do with more rape victims coming forward than an increase in rapes.) The numbers for non-violent crime are better, with big reductions in burglary and vehicle thefts.

But the Palantir-enabled LASER (Los Angeles Strategic Extraction and Restoration) program doesn't appear to have done anything a system utilizing less always-on surveillance could have accomplished. Garbage data gave cops garbage to work with, resulting in a lot of attention being paid to people who weren't causing any problems.

Out of the 637 Chronic Offenders identified by the LAPD, 44% were never arrested for a violent or gun-related crime, despite LASER's attempt to target violent crime. And 10% of Chronic Offenders had zero contacts with police — meaning zero arrests and zero mentions in field interviews. Per LASER’s guidelines, 100% of Chronic Offenders should have already been arrested for a violent crime.

[...]

It also couldn't find evidence that LASER reduced crime. The report said that in 6 out of the 13 LASER Zones, violent crime rates were “the same as, or worse than, those for non-LASER Zones.”

LASER is now dead, thanks to budget issues, COVID-19, and an oversight report the LAPD couldn't credibly contradict. But LASER is still very much alive, doing business under a less memorable name. And it's still powered by Palantir. It's called "Data-Informed, Community-Focused Policing." It sounds friendly, but it's worse than its predecessor.

The new plan formally expands the surveillance that began under LASER. Under LASER, the LAPD said people who were arrested for violent or gun-related crimes could be surveilled. Now, people suspected of nonviolent property crimes can also be.

And for being cutting edge, it clings to some really old fashioned ideas. The presentation for the new LASER says crime can be prevented by "physical maintenance and general upkeep" of property. Broken windows policing is back. And it's got a shiny, high-tech sheen thanks to Palantir.

Filed Under: data, lapd, predictive policing
Companies: palantir

Three LAPD Officers Facing Criminal Charges For Faking Gang Database Records

from the [thinking-face-emoji]-who-are-the-REAL-gangsters-here dept

Law enforcement "gang databases" are a joke. And definitely not a funny one. Officers can convert innocent citizens into gang members just because they live in the same neighborhood or attend the same schools as gang members. Wearing the "wrong" clothes can get people "nominated" for extra law enforcement harassment. So can simply talking to gang members, like volunteers of outreach programs often do.

This has filled gang databases with a bunch of junk data. But it's junk data that can disrupt lives, if not destroy them completely. Los Angeles cops trying to look busy (this is the best spin I can put on this) have been tossing people into CalGang with zero justification whatsoever. More than a twenty officers are under investigation for falsifying records related to the state's gang database.

The investigations continue but it appears at least a few LAPD officers might be heading to jail.

Three Los Angeles police officers were charged Friday with falsifying records and obstructing justice by claiming without evidence that people they stopped were gang members or associates, Los Angeles prosecutors announced Friday.

[...]

The 59-count complaint charged officers Braxton Shaw, Michael Coblentz and Nicolas Martinez with conspiracy to obstruct justice and multiple counts of filing a false police report and preparing false documentary evidence.

Three down. At least twenty to go. One of the three charged did most of the falsifying. Officer Shaw falsified 43 field interview cards, with the others only contributing a total of nine fakes.

Turns out these officers were ratted out by their own equipment.

They allege the officers wrote on cards that people admitted to being gang members, when footage from the officers’ body cameras showed no such admissions or showed the people had explicitly denied gang affiliation.

The falsification went beyond lying about interactions with Los Angeles residents. Officers also conjured up at least a dozen fictional gang members to add to the database.

Some of this can be chalked up to quotas-that-aren't-quotas. Quotas have pretty much been banned everywhere, but law enforcement agencies still rely on metrics that generate the same pressure the now-forbidden quotas did. The LAPD uses field interviews with gang members as a productivity measurement, which encourages officers to engage in fraudulent behavior to secure pay raises and promotions. This doesn't appear to have infected the entire department. Just the one that dealt with gang members the most: the Metro Division. A division with 4% of the force turned in 20% of the department's field interview cards.

The criminal complaint and the multiple ongoing investigations have -- for the moment -- killed CalGang.

Last month, amid widespread protests over police abuses, [LAPD Chief Michael] Moore and Mayor Eric Garcetti announced the LAPD would stop submitting new entries into the CalGang database. Moore this week told the Police Commission that a months-long review found glaring inconsistencies and inaccuracies in how the LAPD used the database, and recommended it permanently halt its participation.

Hopefully, this recommendation sticks. And, just as hopefully, the LAPD won't look to fill this gangland void in the future by creating something else just as damaging and easily-abused once the heat has died down. But if it does create CalGang 2.0, it could fill the database pretty quickly simply by taking a look at the sheriff's deputies next door.

Filed Under: fake records, gang database, lapd, police

LAPD's Failed Predictive Policing Program The Latest COVID-19 Victim

from the [hastily-signs-DNR-certificate] dept

Fucking predictive policing/how the fuck does it work. Mostly, it doesn't. For the most part, predictive policing relies on garbage data generated by garbage cops, turning years of biased policing into "actionable intel" by laundering it through a bunch of proprietary algorithms.

More than half a decade ago, early-ish adopters were expressing skepticism about the tech's ability to suss out the next crime wave. For millions of dollars less, average cops could have pointed out hot crime spots on a map based on where they'd made arrests, while still coming nothing close to the reasonable suspicion needed to declare nearly everyone in a high crime area a criminal suspect.

The Los Angeles Police Department's history with the tech seems to indicate it should have dumped it years ago. The department has been using some form of the tech since 2007, but all it seems to be able to do is waste limited law enforcement resources to violate the rights of Los Angeles residents. The only explanations for the LAPD's continued use of this failed experiment are the sunk cost fallacy and its occasional use as a scapegoat for the department's biased policing.

Predictive policing is finally dead in Los Angeles. Activists didn't kill it. Neither did the LAPD's oversight. Logic did not finally prevail. For lack of a better phrase, it took an act of God {please see paragraph 97(b).2 for coverage limits} to kill a program that has produced little more than community distrust and civil rights lawsuits. Caroline Haskins has more details at BuzzFeed.

An LAPD memo dated April 15 quoted Police Chief Michel R. Moore saying that the police department would stop using the software, effective immediately, not because of concerns that activists have raised but because of financial constraints due to COVID-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus.

"The city's financial crisis, coupled with the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, has resulted in the immediate freeze of new contractual agreements and 'belt-tightening' instructions by the Mayor to all city departments for all further expenditures," the memo said. "Therefore, the Department will immediately discontinue the use of PredPol and its associated reports."

Activists like Hamid Khan of the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition are calling this a win. And it is, sort of. When something you want stopped stops, it's still a victory, even if it appears to be due to unforeseeable developments rather than local activism. This doesn't mean Khan and others shouldn't keep working to keep LAPD's predpol system shut down. But it's perhaps too optimistic to declare this turn of events as a testament to your activism when it appears the LAPD is only temporarily mothballing a program its budget can't support at the moment.

But we can still hold out hope it won't be resurrected when the current crisis passes. The LAPD has struggled to show the program actually impacts criminal activity more than it does Constitutional rights, despite having more than a decade to do so. We can still celebrate its death, even if it's only being buried in effigy at this point. Maybe by the time this has all passed, the LAPD will realize it hasn't missed the expensive software's dubious contribution to the city's safety and abandon it for good.

Filed Under: algorithms, covid-19, lapd, law enforcement, police, predictive policing

LAPD Officers Faked Reports, Added Innocent People To Its Gang Database

from the passive-income-is-the-best-income dept

Sure, gang databases seem like a good idea. Intel on known criminals is important and can help law enforcement keep tabs on the most problematic people in their patrol areas.

Like many things that are great in theory, gang databases are awful in practice. The criteria for being "nominated" is vague and the people doing the nominating -- police officers -- aren't detail-oriented or too worried about tossing innocent people into the virtual clink.

In Chicago, this has led to 15,000 people being (permanently!) listed in the PD's gang database despite there being no gang affiliation named and no reason given for the person's addition to the database. In Boston, wearing certain clothing items (like Nike shoes) or being assaulted by a gang member is enough to get a person added to the PD's gang database.

The databases are so ridiculously inclusive cops have found themselves listed as gang members. One cop became a "gang member" simply because his family car was spotted on the same street as two motorcyclists wearing supposed gang t-shirts.

Given this history of lousy gang databases run by people who display an almost-sociopathic desire to punish innocent people, it comes as no surprise the database the LAPD uses sucks just as hard.

More than a dozen Los Angeles police officers with the elite Metro Division are being investigated on suspicion of falsifying information they gathered during stops and wrongly portraying people as gang members or associates, according to multiple sources.

The officers, assigned to special patrols in South Los Angeles, are suspected of falsifying field interview cards during stops and inputting incorrect information about those questioned in an effort to boost stop statistics.

Just a little standard police misconduct with bonus lifetime repercussions for those falsely added to CalGang, the LAPD's gang database.

In these cases, body camera recordings undercut police reports and narratives, resulting in the removal of "some" officers from active duty. This is good news because it means someone's looking at recordings for something other than footage that might assist prosecutors.

The bad news is everything else. Cops don't do this sort of thing unless they feel comfortable doing it. The snowball effect of lax oversight and toothless discipline long ago reached terminal velocity. Cops falsifying reports and padding stop stats even though they know their actions are being recorded makes it clear the LAPD's accountability efforts have had almost no deterrent effect.

Then there's the database innocent people are being fed into. There are currently 90,000 people in the LAPD's gang database. The database did not implement removal procedures until 2017, 20 years after its debut. The LAPD, which shares this database with seven other law enforcement agencies, did not remove a single person in 2018.

The LAPD handles its nomination process just as cavalierly as the departments in Chicago and Boston. Cops added Larry Sanders, a gang interventionist, to CalGang after hassling him and few other people in a park, demanding they lift their shirts and show officers their tattoos. (The officers claimed they were answering a call about public drinking, but the people drinking in public were never approached by the officers.) Sanders, who has lived in the area his entire life, has never been arrested or a member of a gang.

Another man, Brian Allen, was added to the database just because he lives in an area where gang activity is prevalent. Allen was told he was added for "associating with gang members," which is vague enough to encompass simply making small talk with anyone in his neighborhood.

This latest news is more of the same: people being added to the gang database because they're minorities and because cops can nominate anyone they want to without really having to worry about being held responsible for their actions.

Meanwhile, the "removal from active duty" suggests suspension or desk work, rather than termination, which makes this statement by LAPD Chief Michel Moore especially ridiculous:

“An officer’s integrity must be absolute. There is no place in the Department for any individual who would purposely falsify information on a Department report,” Moore said in a statement.

Great, but these officers are still "in the Department." Maybe that will change once the investigations have concluded, but termination seems unlikely. There will be a place in the LAPD for these officers once the news cycle ends and their union has applied pressure. And, if the LAPD can actually get rid of them, they'll just end up violating citizens' rights at some other law enforcement agency.

Filed Under: faked reports, gang database, lapd

LAPD Infiltrated An Anti-Fascist Protest Group Because The First Amendment Is Apparently Just A Suggestion

from the 'let's-prove-their-point!'-the-Major-Crimes-Division-exclaimed dept

Maybe the LAPD doesn't have the experience its counter-coastal counterpart has in inflicting damage to rights and liberties, but it's trying, dammit! The NYPD's brushes with the Constitution are numerous and perpetual. The LAPD may have spent more time working on the Fourth and Fifth Amendments during its Rampart peak, but now it's rolling up on the First Amendment like a repurposed MRAP on a small town lawn.

The Los Angeles Police Department ordered a confidential informant to monitor and record meetings held by a political group that staged protests against President Trump in 2017, a move that has drawn concern and consternation from civil rights advocates.

On four separate occasions in October 2017, the informant entered Echo Park United Methodist Church with a hidden recorder and captured audio of meetings held by the Los Angeles chapter of Refuse Fascism, a group that has organized a number of large-scale demonstrations against the Trump administration in major U.S. cities, according to court records reviewed by The Times.

Perhaps no entities show more concern about opposition to fascism than law enforcement agencies, for some weird and completely inexplicable reason. Somehow, this investigation involved the Major Crimes Division, which felt the need to get involved because of all the major criminal activity that is the hallmark of protest groups.

What sort of major crimes are we talking about? Well, let's just check the record…

Police reports and transcripts documenting the informant’s activities became public as part of an ongoing case against several members of Refuse Fascism who were charged with criminal trespassing…

I see the term "major" has been redefined by the Major Crimes Division to encompass anything it might feel the urge to investigate. Supposedly, this incursion on the First Amendment was the result of an "abundance of caution" following reports of violent clashes between anti-fascists and alt-right demonstrators at other protests/rallies.

Again, the LAPD seems to not understand the meaning of the words it uses, because an "abundance of caution" should have resulted in steering clear of First Amendment-protected activities, rather than infiltrating them.

Also, an abundance of caution might have resulted in the LAPD checking out the other set of theoretical combatants, but the Los Angeles Times reports a police official said no attempt was made to infiltrate any far-right protest groups.

"Major." "Caution." "Consistency." These words are beyond the department's comprehension. And here's the kicker: the Major Crimes Division did not send its informant in until after the demonstration was already over, the freeway had already been blocked, and criminal trespassing charges had already been brought. This wasn't an investigation. It was a fishing expedition targeting people who don't like fascists that used the First Amendment as a doormat. Calls to the LAPD's Irony Division were not returned.

I guess we're all supposed to feel better about this now that the LAPD has promised to investigate itself over its First Amendment-infringing infiltration. But it seems a department that routinely struggles to use words properly and cannot steer clear of the Constitutional shoreline shouldn't be trusted to run a fax machine, much less an internal investigation.

Filed Under: 1st amendment, activism, antifa, free speech, lapd, major crimes, protests, refuse facisism, surveillance

LAPD Watchdog Says Department's Data-Based Policing Is Producing Nothing But Wasted Time And Rights Violations

from the only-looks-like-you're-working-smarter dept

The Los Angeles Police Department has just received some bad news from its oversight. It's probably good news for the policed -- many of whom are being disproportionately targeted thanks to biased input data -- but the LAPD can't be pleased that its reliance on expensive, mostly-automated tools hasn't produced worthwhile results.

The department relies on a handful of tech tools to aid in its policing, but it doesn't appear to be helping. It has CompStat -- a holdover from the early 2000's when Bill Bratton still ran the department. To that framework, it has added LASER -- a nifty acronym that stands for "Los Angeles' Strategic Extraction and Restoration." The program with the reverse engineered nickname actually relies on input from human analysts to determine where officers should be deployed. But this reliance on data-driven policing isn't making the city any safer, despite LASER's focus on violent crime.

Here's what the LAPD's human analysts put together for the department's patrol officers.

In perhaps the most contentious strategy, each of the department’s 21 geographic areas used data to compile lists or “bulletins” of people calculated to be among the top 12 “chronic offenders.”

The program assigns people points based on prior criminal histories, such as arrest records, gang affiliation, probation and parole status and recent police contacts.

This strategy received some public blow-back, resulting in the department abandoning it last August. Nothing of value was lost.

[Inspector General Mark] Smith examined data collected prior to the suspension.

He found 44 percent of chronic offenders had either zero or one arrest for violent crimes. About half had no arrest for gun-related crimes.

So much for curbing violent crime. All it did was create a loop where cops targeted nonviolent offenders, resulting in another arrest/detention that added more points to the person's LASER record, resulting in even more targeting and, inevitably, more interactions with police officers. It's a feedback loop no one can escape.

To make things worse, officers had the power to place people into this damaging loop by "nominating" them for targeting with LASER. The point-based system that was supposed to limit this targeting to just the worst of worst street criminals could be bypassed. Nominated citizens would find themselves rising up the ranks on the LASER lists, racking up points simply by officers performing stops based on faulty inputs.

And while the tech is supposedly improving, the quality of policing isn't. CompStat has had nearly a 20-year run in LA, but its results are negligible. Predictive policing -- which has its own bias issues -- isn't doing any better.

Like the other program, Smith found discrepancies with the data collection and could not draw conclusions to “meaningfully evaluate” the program’s overall effectiveness to reduce crime, the report said.

Unfortunately, the report recommends the LAPD stay the course. The LAPD is supposed to spend more time "reviewing" the data that isn't producing results and tailor its outputs with an eye on Constitutional rights. As it stands now, the LAPD is allowing databases to conjure up reasonable suspicion for stops. That can't keep happening. But the way forward can't be more of the same, only at a slightly slower pace.

Filed Under: civil rights, compustat, data-based policing, lapd, laser, los angeles, mark smith

LAPD Finally Starts Fixing Its Awful Body Camera Policy, But It's Not All Good News

from the chipping-away-at-opacity dept

It appears the city of Los Angeles is finally going to revise its terrible police body camera policy. Nearly $60 million was spent outfitting officers with cameras, but the end result provided little value to taxpayers. As it stands now, the only way to access footage is to engage in civil litigation with the police department (over violated rights, not rejected records requests) or be a defendant in a criminal case. Even then, a judge still has to be convinced you have a right to see the footage, even if you're one of the subjects.

The proposed law change would flip the situation entirely around, putting the burden on law enforcement to show why footage should remain out of public view.

Under the proposal drafted by Richard Tefank, executive director of the Police Commission, video shot during critical incidents -- which includes shootings, in-custody deaths and other major events -- would be released within 45 days. The new policy would apply to body cameras, in-car video, police facility surveillance video, drones and video, in the department's possession, that was captured by third parties.

That very last bit is concerning as it gives police control of third-party footage, which will incentivize the seizure of bystanders' phones and nearby businesses' surveillance video. This might work if law enforcement only makes copies of this footage, leaving third parties free to release their footage whenever they want.

But it would definitely dial back the restraints on police-generated footage. It creates a presumption of release that must face review every 14 days if law enforcement agencies wish to continue withholding footage. Unfortunately, this process will still be mostly an inside job. Review of requested delays will fall on the police chief and two selected commissioners from the LAPD's Board of Police Commissioners. While the Board is composed of five "civilian" commissioners, its independent power will be somewhat weakened by its limited presence during footage release reviews.

The single bright note in all of this is that it appears the Board is generally responsive to citizens' concerns and complaints. According to the NBC Los Angeles story, this small step towards openness was prompted by public input on body-worn camera policies.

The commission last year retained the Policing Project at New York University School of Law to gather public input into a new policy regarding the release of body-worn camera video. According to a report it released last September, a majority of members of the general public who responded to a Policing Project survey said video shot during critical incidents should be made publicly within a short period of time.

It's not as good as it could be. And the land grab on third-party video hopefully only limits the release of copies maintained by the LAPD. While it would be all but impossible to make the current situation worse, the hesitant step in right direction shows LAPD officials are starting to realize running a closed shop only further alienates the communities the department serves. Hopefully, additional public input will continue steering the agency towards more openness in the future.

Filed Under: body cameras, lapd, police, transparency

California's Top Court Says Cops Have To Hand Over Automatic Plate Reader Records

from the no-more-hiding-behind-abused-exceptions dept

The EFF and ACLU have achieved a victory in an acronym-heavy public records case. The California Supreme Court has ruled the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) and Los Angeles Sheriff's Department (LASD) will have to turn over data acquired by their automatic license plate readers (ALPRs).

Both entities tried to keep these records from the EFF and ACLU by claiming every single one of the millions of plate records were "investigatory records," exempt from disclosure under California's public records law. This apparently included the millions of "non-hit" records never utilized in any LAPD/LASD investigation. With the plate readers collecting 1.5-2 million records per week, they were basically arguing every driver passing by an ALPR was under investigation.

That's not how the state's Supreme Court sees it [PDF]. The "investigatory records" exemption pertains to targeted, ongoing investigations. The public records law cannot be stretched to cover indiscriminate mass surveillance.

Accordingly, we hold that real parties’ process of ALPR scanning does not produce records of investigations, because the scans are not conducted as part of a targeted inquiry into any particular crime or crimes. The scans are conducted with an expectation that the vast majority of the data collected will prove irrelevant for law enforcement purposes. We recognize that it may not always be an easy task to identify the line between traditional “investigation” and the sort of “bulk” collection at issue here. But wherever the line may ultimately fall, it is at least clear that real parties’ ALPR process falls on the bulk collection side of it.

The court also says the fact that the database of records is routinely searched during current investigations does not make everything in it immune from public records requests. If the law were interpreted this way, all it would take to exempt every one of the millions of plate records from disclosure would be the inclusion of a targeted plate in every batch of ALPR records requested.

The law enforcement agencies also claimed any release of the data would harm law enforcement interests, supposedly by giving criminals the info they needed to avoid plate readers. The Supreme Court finds this far less persuasive than the lower court did.

The trial court appears to have placed significant weight on the possibility that a criminal could use ALPR data to identify law enforcement patrol patterns. The court did so based on the declaration of LAPD Sergeant Daniel Gomez. In pertinent part, Sergeant Gomez claimed that an individual requesting ALPR data “could use the data to try and identify patterns of a particular vehicle.” (Italics added.) However, Sergeant Gomez also seemed to cast doubt on the likelihood that an individual could do so successfully, explaining that “[u]nlike law enforcement that uses additional departmental resources to validate captured [A]LPR information, a private person would be basing their assumptions solely on the data created by the [A]LPR system . . . .” Nevertheless, we will assume, as the trial court found, that a person could at least roughly infer patrol patterns from a week’s worth of plate scan data.

The problem with this aspect of the trial court’s analysis is that, even assuming patrol patterns can be inferred from ALPR data, there is little reason to believe that this possibility points meaningfully toward “a clear overbalance on the side of confidentiality” with respect to all the records sought. (Michaelis, supra, 38 Cal.4th at p. 1071.) For one thing, fixed ALPR scanners are just that—fixed— so concerns about patrol patterns are inapplicable to the data they collect. For another, the record does not appear to indicate that knowledge of where law enforcement officers were during a particular week is a reliable guide to where they will be at some precise moment in the future. The trial court did not find, for example, that real parties conduct law enforcement in the same way that they might operate a bus service—moving from point to point at particular times on particular days, never deviating to attend to other business or emergencies. We are not aware of substantial evidence that would have supported such a finding.

The court, however, does find one thing to be concerned with, and it's an issue the LAPD/LASD generally doesn't take into consideration until they're being asked to hand over bulk collection records: privacy.

Although we acknowledge that revealing raw ALPR data would be helpful in determining the extent to which ALPR technology threatens privacy, the act of revealing the data would itself jeopardize the privacy of everyone associated with a scanned plate. Given that real parties each conduct more than one million scans per week, this threat to privacy is significant. We therefore conclude that the public interest in preventing such disclosure “clearly outweighs the public interest served by disclosure of” these records.

This means the ACLU and EFF will end up with the data they seek, but in anonymized form. It's unclear at this point how this will be anonymized, or if the data, in its abstracted form, will show anything interesting. And there's still more discussion to be had on remand before the ACLU/EFF can actually take possession of the one week of ALPR data they requested. But it's still a significant precedent -- one that narrows the scope of an often-abused public records exemption.

Filed Under: alpr, automatic license plate reader, california, california supreme court, la, lapd, lasd, license plate readers, public records, transparency
Companies: aclu, eff

'Credible' Email Bomb Threat Shuts Down LA Schools... Sent From 'madbomber@cock.li'

from the that's-credible? dept

As you may have heard, Los Angeles closed all of its public schools today based on a bomb threat that the district deemed to be "credible." Later in the day, New York City's school district announced that it had received the same, or a similar, bomb threat, and had deemed it not credible and kept its schools open. Later in the day, it was reported that the bomb threats appeared to be a hoax.

Now, rather than deeming them "credible" or "not credible" perhaps a better term would be "incredible."

That's because it now appears that both bomb threats were sent from the throwaway email address "madbomber@cock.li." "cock.li" is an anonymous emailer service, whose website I wouldn't necessarily recommend visiting -- especially if you're not a fan of autoplay videos. Either way, the guy who operates cock.li -- Vincent Canfield -- posted to Twitter that both threats were sent via the "meme" emailer, and that he had received subpoenas trying to find out who was behind the "madbomber" account.

Canfield has posted the details of his contact with law enforcement over all of this, including two phone calls with police where he asks about the gag clause in the subpoena and is told that it's a "request" rather than an order. The first phone call was a bit more confrontational.

The releases also include the emails sent by the NYPD:

Good Morning,

Attached is a subpoena requesting subscriber, IP logs and other user information pertaining to a Cock.li email address, which used to send a threatening email to the superintendent of the NYC Public schools. We are requesting that these results be expedited do to the severity of this threat, thank you for your attention in this matter and have a nice day.

Detective Michael Arena

NYPD Intelligence Bureau

It does seem that that New York City made the right call in judging the threats to be non-credible, though a little ridiculous in originally pretending that Canfield was gagged over discussing them. And, it does appear that the LA Unified School District over-reacted in shutting down all of its schools (which it did without even talking to the LAPD) -- though, to some extent, you can understand why such a decision was made.

Still, it seems that a bomb threat coming from "madbomber@cock.li" probably should have raised a few eyebrows...

Filed Under: cock.li, lapd, lausd, memes, nypd, schools, shut down, threats, vincent canfield