Back to LAPD Architecture of Surveillance
Back to The AOS Platform
The Architecture of Surveillance (AOS) Platform is an ongoing project organized by the Data-Driven Policing Working Group within the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition. The platform contains a database collection of 52 articles (pages) about surveillance architecture, and other pages that dive deeper into histories, themes, and resources related to the architecture of surveillance.
<aside> š£ āArchitecture of Surveillanceā refers to various elements of human-based and electronic-based systems, technologies, programs, and spatial practices that the LAPD and policing partnerships around the world use to surveil us.
</aside>
These tools of social control are deployed through various sectors, including social services, health care, housing, and employment. This enables a constant surveillance and policing of our bodies in every aspect of our lives. Communities of color, immigrants, and poor folks are the primary targets of these modes of surveillance.
As a project of the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition, our work does not take the top-down policy reform or recommendation approach. We do not seek more transparency and oversight of policing, an institution that remains inherently violent and flawed by design. Instead, our work, rooted in the community, and our fight for abolition of policing brings us together in exposing the multiple tentacles of state violence, including the creation of the Other, knowledge production and the deep complicity of academia, corporate profit, and the deadly impact and trauma of policing programs on our communities.
The Coalition has gathered information about policing surveillance through collective study and community-based research. This research is collected and organized using platforms such as Google Docs and Notion, and the AOS Platform exists to organize that information and make it more accessible.
The Stop LAPD Spying Coalition is a community organization founded in 2011. We work to build community power toward abolishing police surveillance.
Our work is largely volunteer-based, and is accountable first and foremost to an organizing base made up of those who are most vulnerable to police violence, particularly in the Skid Row community where we are located. We work to build power among that base and across the city.
In our organizing, we have developed various frameworks by which to talk about the policing and surveillance of communities. One of these is the Architecture of Surveillance, which can be viewed on the Coalition website.