Back to LAPD Architecture of Surveillance

<aside> 🗣 “Architecture of Surveillance” 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.

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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.

There are several ways to understand the Architecture of Surveillance.

One way is to break down the architecture into categories.

Here is a suggested category set to help identify the methods and technologies of the architecture of surveillance:

Surveilling You

The Coalition’s thinking about these categories is flexible. See About the AOS Platform for “Stalker State” and “Information Sharing Environment” diagrams that offer different ways of visualizing surveillance architecture. Do you have your own way of categorizing the architecture? Let us know: Submit a Query

Another way is to map the institutional relationships and power structures that make up the architecture.

Academic Complicity

Corporate Profit

Explore Surveillance Architecture through other pages on the AOS Platform.

→ How does surveillance architecture operate in communities? Community Histories

→ How did the Coalition develop the framework of surveillance architecture? About the AOS Platform