If you like Isaac Asimov novels, you'll love our reality right now. In 2010, the LAPD teamed up with Motorola Solutions to deploy military-grade technology in tracking the goings-on in high-crime areas like the Jordan Downs projects; now they're employing those same technologies and newer, more advanced ones to monitor people across the city before they've committed crimes, as LA Weekly reports. How does "predictive policing" work? It starts with your car. If you have a license plate, the LAPD has its eyes on you, thanks to license-plate-reading technology that records your plate number any time you pass police cars with cameras or when you drive past street-mounted cameras. That network could even expand: The LADOT has a system of 460 cameras posted above major roads and intersections to watch traffic, and those could soon be digitized and fed into the LAPD's surveillance network. The pre-crime approach to policing doesn't stop there.
If you don't want to be tracked, you could walk or bike, but there's also tech in place now throughout the Topanga and Foothill divisions of the LAPD that uses live-monitored CCTV cameras outfitted with facial-recognition software. These are supposedly used to tip cops off to people who are on watch lists or have outstanding warrants, but there's no way to know what is actually being collected, or what they're doing with it all.
The ACLU and the Electronic Frontier Foundation have filed a suit against the LAPD, demanding to see a sample of the "160 million data points showing the exact whereabouts of L.A.-area drivers on given dates" that they are accumulating and sharing with two dozen other police agencies. Until we see that, maybe just be on your best behavior?
· Forget the NSA, the LAPD Spies on Millions of Innocent Folks [LAW]
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