Operation LASER stands for “Los Angeles Strategic Extraction and Restoration.” Developed and used in Los Angeles, Operation LASER was a person-based and place-based so-called Predictive Policing strategy that LAPD claimed was a response to gun and gang violence.
Operation LASER built upon the concept of Hot Spot Policing and added person-based policing, called the Chronic Offender Program. LASER was an implementation of the fallacy that police could (and would) gather reports of crime as well as crime “intelligence” and conduct analyses to determine where in Los Angeles neighborhoods crime was going to happen, or was most likely to happen, and who was most likely to commit a crime. This premise allowed LAPD and its research partner, Justice and Security Strategies (JSS), to gather, access, and purchase more data about neighborhoods and to implement targeted surveillance, suppression, and increased policing of people and locations, all under the guise of “preventing crime.”
Part of a trifold created by the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition in 2018 for community outreach around Operation LASER. This part of the diagram maps out the location-based aspect of Operation LASER.
LASER was developed by long-time LAPD research partner Justice and Security Strategies (JSS), the police consulting firm headed by Craig Uchida. Later described as an “experiment” by LAPD Police Chief Michel Moore, LASER was funded by a 2009 Smart Policing Initiative (SPI) grant of $899,959 from the Bureau of Justice Assistance. Operation LASER was also a more formalized testing of S.A.R.A. or SARA (Scanning, Analysis, Response, Assessment), which LAPD had been using in some manner for decades.
Uchida claimed LASER was analogous to medical surgery, with LAPD police playing the role of “trained medical doctors” who were in neighborhoods to “extract tumors” - which is how Operation LASER referred to people it deemed to be likely to commit crime. In a 2012 report by JSS, the analogy is explained in more detail:
The basic premise is to target with laser-like precision the violent repeat offenders and gang members who commit crimes in the specific target areas. The program is analogous to laser surgery, where a trained medical doctor uses modern technology to remove tumors or improve eyesight. First, the area is carefully diagnosed: Who are the offenders, and where and when are they involved in criminal activity? Plans are then developed to remove offenders from an area with minimal invasiveness and minimal harm to the people and areas around them. Extraction of offenders takes place in a “non-invasive” manner (no task forces or saturation patrol activities), and the result produces less disruption in neighborhoods. Continuing with the medical analogy, by extracting offenders surgically, recovery time of the neighborhood is faster.
The research phase of Operation LASER began in 2009, and the program was first launched in Newton Division in September 2011. LASER was officially expanded to 16 of LAPD’s 21 divisions by 2018, with the goal of being used across all divisions by 2019. It should be noted as well that unofficially, some additional divisions that had not yet been slated to begin using Operation LASER were using some variation or aspects of the program at the time of the 2019 audit by the Office of the Inspector General.
At the core of the LASER program within each LAPD division was the Crime Intelligence Detail (CID) and the Palantir data analysis platform. The CID was typically composed of three sworn officers and one crime analyst, and was responsible for overseeing the LASER program in their respective divisions.
Image description: A 2017 LAPD crime map identifies “hot spots” of crime to determine Operation LASER zones (drawn boxes) for further surveillance. Image source: stoplapdspying.medium.com
To determine which areas would be targeted by LASER, The CID used a Crime Mapping (Esri GIS) system called ArcGIS and LAPD’s Crime Analysis Mapping System (CAMS) to bring together locations of reported crime, arrest data, and calls for service that were associated with gun violence or a violent crime. This generated a map of hot spots (see Hot Spot Policing) for reports of this activity, which analysts used to determine LASER zones, by essentially creating boxes around the areas with the highest density of hot spots. LASER Zones were then submitted to the area’s Commander for approval, then entered into Palantir so that crime statistics and police activity in the area could further be tracked.
LASER Zones were communicated as being areas of high rates of crime and gun violence, where police could anticipate violence would happen. This was used to justify escalated policing and surveillance tactics in those areas including pre-emptive stops and the use of Field Interview Card (FI Card)s, Patrols, Automatic License Plate Readers (ALPRs) technology and plate scans of entire neighborhoods, Helicopters patrols, Social media surveillance, and the tracking and harassment of individuals within the area who were deemed to be “Chronic Offenders” of violent crime.