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Creating and filing California Public Records Act (PRA) requests, or PRAs with LAPD and other public agencies has been one tactic used by the Coalition to learn more about and expose the operations, relationships, contracts, and workings of LAPD surveillance and policing programs.
Public records laws vary by state, and individual cities may have different ways of responding to record requests. The City of Los Angeles maintains the NextRequest platform, where anyone can make a request and search existing requests (going back to the platform’s beginning in late 2017).
One of the reasons the Architecture of Surveillance project and database exists in its most recent form is to be able to better organize and update the knowledge gleaned from PRA requests and other sources of information.
To share more about public records laws and how they are used in organizing, in 2022 the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition and Law for Black Lives published the zine, Know Your Fights! Using Public Records Laws in Abolitionist Organizing.
You can access it here: https://stoplapdspying.org/knowyourfights
A PRA request led to the creation of the WATCH THE WATCHERS website that you can use to identify officers who are causing harm in your community, and this zine in 2023: Know Your Local Cops: A Resource for Skid Row Counter-Surveillance.
You can access it here: https://stoplapdspying.org/know-your-local-cops-a-resource-for-skid-row-counter-surveillance/
KNOW_YOUR_LOCAL_COPS_Central_Division.pdf
The state has always used data to contain, control, and criminalize our communities, and “data-driven policing” is how police automate and justify their racism, violence, and banishment in our communities. The term “data-driven policing” refers to the collection and mining of mass data to determine which people and places will be policed. It includes hot-spot policing, predictive policing, proactive policing, intelligence-led policing, and more.
To learn more about the Coalition’s Fight Against Data-Driven Policing and its Working Group, please visit the Coalition’s page regarding Data-Driven Policing and Our Fight.
Many of the public records that were produced in response to the Coalition’s PRA requests are collected in the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition Archive (SLSC Archive):
Collections - Stop LAPD Spying Coalition Archive
The Archive also features a teach-in presentation about How To File A Public Records Request…
How To File A Public Records Request
… and a documentary about the Archive called Understanding & Resisting: Archiving the Resistance Against Surveillance and the Stalker State in Los Angeles, Today:
Understanding & Resisting: A Documentary About the Archive - Stop LAPD Spying Coalition Archive