Palantir Manual Shows How Law Enforcement Tracks Families
The killing of George Floyd last May sparked renewed scrutiny of information-driven policing. As protests raged around the globe, i,400 researchers signed an open letter calling on their colleagues to cease collaborating with police on algorithms, and cities similar Santa Cruz, New Orleans, and Oakland variously banned predictive policing, facial recognition, and vocalism recognition. Simply elsewhere, constabulary chiefs worked to deepen partnerships with tech companies, challenge that the answer to systemic bias and racism was simply more than data.
In her new book, "Predict and Surveil: Information, Discretion, and the Time to come of Policing," sociologist Sarah Brayne slays that supposition with granular detail. An assistant professor at the University of Texas at Austin, Brayne did months of fieldwork at the Los Angeles Constabulary Department and other constabulary enforcement agencies in the area, tagging along every bit cops used software from Palantir, PredPol, and other companies. She learned that software vendors routinely show up at the department to peddle their wares, like pharmaceutical representatives visiting doctors' offices. She noted how police used an automatic license plate reader mounted exterior an emergency room to build out networks of victims' associates. A sergeant explained that family or friends would often drib off an injured person and and so speed away. With the automated license plate reader, he said, constabulary could use plate numbers to determine who else was continued to the victim, even if there was no other evidence linking them to a offense.
Riding along in department helicopters, Brayne saw how data was used to justify farthermost measures. In order to get a reduction in crime in one sectionalization, police force concluded that they had to fly helicopters overhead 51 times per week. They often increased that to 80 to 90 flyovers for good measure out, significant that many residents' days were regularly interrupted by the noise of buzzing choppers. The cops seemed to register the intrusion. They dubbed the copters "ghetto birds."
Image: Courtesy Oxford University Press
For years, scholars and activists have critiqued the algorithms used in data-driven policing, arguing that they just techwash bias past making sloppy investigative work seem objective. Leading the charge in Los Angeles is the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition. Through public records requests, the group's activists have obtained documents on police use of data analytics, and in 2018, they successfully pushed the city's Role of the Inspector General to audit the department's use of technology. "Surveillance is basically the tip of the policing knife," said Hamid Khan, a co-leader of the coalition. "When you look at policing and the history of policing, from our vantage point, it's non about public safety when it comes to nonwhite folks. It's about the content to cause harm." Big information, he added, simply gives police more ways to do that.
Brayne's contribution is showing exactly how information is distorted in the hands of police. "Most sociological research on criminal justice has focused on those who are being policed," she told The Intercept. "I very deliberately wanted to flip the lens to focus on those doing the surveilling — on the police force themselves."
Andrew Guthrie Ferguson, a police professor at American Academy and author of "The Rise of Big Data Policing: Surveillance, Race, and the Hereafter of Law Enforcement," said that Brayne's work is an unflinching wait at what happens when people in power employ emerging technologies. "Her volume is a completely original inside look at the development of big data surveillance at the height of the showtime generation of its adoption," he said. "Sarah has been given access to the reality of large information policing in a way that no ane else has — and probably, because of her success, no one else ever will."
Photo: Patrick T. Fallon for The Washington Post via Getty Images
Operation LASER
Brayne start embedded with the section in 2013 as a 27-year-old graduate student. Information technology was a critical moment for policing tech, and the LAPD and other departments were ramping up their use of technology. The LAPD had signed on with Palantir Gotham, which merges data from crime and abort reports, automatic license plate readers, rap sheets, and other sources. The section also had a contract with PredPol, which generates "boxes," or hot spots, where property crimes similar burglaries and motorcar theft are predicted to occur. A third programme, Operation Laser, which stands for Los Angeles' Strategic Extraction and Restoration plan, used a points-based system, chosen a Laser score, to evaluate the adventure that individuals posed.
In Brayne'southward first interview, a captain boasted that the LAPD was at the forefront of engineering science adoption, detailing how software that had been developed for counterterrorism work was helping the department ward off hereafter crimes. After, Brayne asked to keep a ride-forth with an officer. That trip revealed a more complicated picture. Instead of pulling up PredPol's software on the laptop mounted to his dashboard, the cop worked with a printout of PredPol's hot spots. He explained that the department's in-auto laptops had trouble loading fifty-fifty standard internet browsers. So much for technological wizardry.
Brayne and the officer took a suspension to eat In-N-Out burgers under a highway overpass, where they watched his colleagues bosom upwards a abound operation and drag marijuana plants onto a flatbed truck. Then when they collection to a new location, Brayne noticed that the officer typed in his address manually, rather than let the car's automatic vehicle tracker register his location. The union opposed officers being tracked, he explained. While predictive policing systems had caught average citizens in an opaque dragnet, constabulary grew squeamish when the technology was turned back on them.
The notion that better engineering science can fix policing dates to at least the early 20th century. Back then, law departments were closely tied to urban center government political machines. Arguing that a data-driven approach would make policing more professional, reformers introduced tactics drawn from war machine operations, including signal boxes, telephone kiosks, and pin mapping. The militarization of police force accelerated during the 1960s and has connected to the present day, to the betoken where even departments in placid American suburbs now take armored vehicles, night vision viewers, and bayonets.
"That's a very visible manifestation of the militarization of policing," said Brayne. "But something that'due south more invisible is this pitter-patter of surveillance software into the daily operations of policing."
Photograph: Michael Robinson Chavez/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images
Subsequently nine/11, the Department of Homeland Security gave state and local police $35 billion in grants, a portion of which was spent on developing data infrastructure. The infusion of cash created needs where there had been none. Police chiefs realized that the data they nerveless for Homeland Security could likewise exist used for regular policing. In Los Angeles, some officials came to believe that predictive analytics and big data might also solve the section's many issues. The LAPD had been racked by a stream of high-profile scandals, most infamously the 1991 beating of Rodney King. In 2001, the Department of Justice imposed a consent decree, a court order mandating that the department conduct regular audits and capture more data on officers and crimes. (A spokesperson for the LAPD declined to annotate for this article.)
A key figure behind the shift toward predictive policing was William Bratton, who brought the data management organization COMPSTAT to New York City earlier becoming the chief of the LAPD in 2002. Bratton oversaw the LAPD's effort to merge various streams of data.
One upshot was Operation LASER, which was funded with nearly a million dollars from the federal Agency of Justice Assistance. When they came into contact with someone who seemed suspicious, officers filled out a bill of fare with the person's name, address, physical characteristics, vehicle information, gang affiliation, and criminal history. Each new point of contact with law earned a person one additional point. "There are a lot of chickenshit violations you tin stop someone for," a sergeant explained to Brayne during a ride-along. "Yesterday, this individual might have got stopped because he jaywalked. Today, he might have got stopped because he didn't apply his plow indicate or whatever the case might be. So that's two points." The sergeant went on to argue that even such minor violations could help police predict the side by side law-breaking because, taken together, they show "who is out on the streets."
Such a system means, of grade, that individuals in overpoliced neighborhoods tin easily get caught up in a vicious cycle where they are, equally Brayne writes, "more likely to be stopped, thus increasing their point value, justifying their increased surveillance, and making it more probable that they will exist stopped over again in the future." But some of the administrators whom Brayne encountered were apparently less interested in accuracy than they were in amassing more records. The goal, one captain told her, was merely to become people "in the organisation": to capture larger and larger amounts of information on seemingly harmless individuals in the promise that the data would help solve a crime after on. Once an officer had a person in the system, they could set an alert to automatically track changes in that person's profile.
Brayne watched Los Angeles law make full out cards for Functioning Laser and noted that they often listed the people who were with a person when they were stopped. She calls this a "secondary surveillance network." You don't really need to take contact with police to exist caught up in the organisation; you only demand to have had contact with someone who did. Similarly, Brayne learned that images captured by automated license plate readers sometimes showed the faces of people who were stopped with a person of interest. Those people besides became data. When Brayne raised the issue of possible legal constraints effectually the rampant drove and sharing of data, an employee in the Los Angeles County Chief Information Role alleged bluntly, "Consent is anachronistic."
In some cases, even being the subject of a query can heave someone'due south suspiciousness. Brayne watched 1 detective search a national database for a juvenile. He remarked that he could encounter how many times other users had queried the aforementioned name. He claimed that the characteristic had helped police force catch criminals because information technology told them other officers had suspected the same individual. When Brayne asked why that was useful, he replied, "Simply considering you haven't been arrested doesn't hateful you oasis't been defenseless."
Decades of enquiry and years of cellphone videos take shown, of grade, that law regularly target people who oasis't committed crimes. On ride-alongs, Brayne watched cops run the plates of constabulary-constant drivers stopped at traffic lights, just in case the numbers turned upward a record. But the anecdote underscores how thoroughly big information reinforces existing police biases. One captain claimed, "Information technology's just math."
Photo: Michael Nagle/Bloomberg via Getty Images
The World Co-ordinate to Palantir
In Brayne's fieldwork, Palantir'southward applied science came in for special praise. "They catch bad guys during every grooming class," one sergeant told her. A helm rhapsodized nearly the platform's abiding improver of new data sets, marveling at the add-on of foreclosure information: "I'k so happy with how large Palantir got." Another said of Palantir, "Nosotros've dumped hundreds of thousands [of dollars] into that. They are then responsive and flexible about what nosotros want. They're cracking. They're going to have over the earth. I hope y'all, they're going to take over the earth."
But up shut, the software was only as good as the people maintaining and using information technology. To make sense of Palantir Gotham's data, police often need input from engineers, some of whom are provided past Palantir. At one bespeak in her inquiry, Brayne watched a Palantir engineer search 140 million records for a hypothetical man of average build driving a black four-door sedan. The engineer narrowed those results to 2 million records, and so to 160,000, and finally to thirteen people, before checking which of those people had arrests on their records. At various points in the search, he made assumptions that could easily throw off the result — that the car was probable fabricated betwixt 2002 and 2005, that the man was heavy-set. Brayne asked what happened if the system served up a false positive. "I don't know," the engineer replied.
At that place were dissenters. Some of the people tasked with implementing data-driven policing at the LAPD complained to Brayne that the software didn't work equally advertised. I person working in data technology said, "Our command staff is hands distracted by the latest and greatest shiny object." Information integration was uneven. Some divisions had certain software, while others didn't. Another employee told Brayne that the detective case direction system was "sort of like a pimple," calculation, "they just, like, stuck it on top."
When management was out of the room, police were honest about their doubts. "Looks bitching, but it'southward worthless," 1 sergeant told Brayne of the LAPD's data analysis infrastructure, which is housed at the section'southward Existent-Time Analysis and Disquisitional Response Sectionalization. Ane group of officers bought their captain a Ouija board to mock his organized religion in algorithms. A captain told Brayne that person-based predictive policing was "a civil liberties nightmare" and that he would never adopt information technology. (His division adopted information technology after he left.)
Activists who accept fought for years against section use of technology told The Intercept that Brayne's work is useful — but simply to a bespeak. "It was very helpful to uncover and learn nearly the all-encompassing amounts of stuff that LAPD was doing," said Jamie Garcia, an organizer with Stop LAPD Spying. "Simply then what?" In general, she added, she is tired of academics treating surveillance like a problem to discover and evaluate. "The information goes dorsum to the ivory belfry, and the ivory tower has this conversation with themselves almost what they think about information technology instead of that information being brought directly to the community."
Brayne said that she hopes her work tin can be useful to a broad variety of people. "Transparency is the first pace towards accountability," she said. "It is incommunicable to concur an individual or system accountable if yous don't know what they're doing."
Forrest Stuart, a sociologist at Stanford who studies policing, said that her book is essential at a moment when anti-racism protests have prompted some law enforcement officials to further embrace technology every bit a means for reducing bias. "Some of the most pop proposed solutions to the over-policing and over-incarceration of black and dark-brown communities have involved new technologies," he wrote in an email. "There is a sense that if we could only design a good enough computer plan, we could deploy police more fairly and reduce, or perhaps even eliminate, unwarranted disparities in criminal justice. Brayne's book makes united states take real suspension and recognize the faults in this techno-optimist dream."
The LAPD ended its contract with PredPol terminal April, citing financial constraints brought on past the pandemic. Performance LASER ended in 2019. But a range of other companies, including heavyweights like Amazon and Microsoft, have moved into the space nationally, and a guidebook published by the LAPD final year makes clear that big data will continue to prominently figure in policing in Los Angeles. Palantir, meanwhile, has lately expanded its access to data past moving into coronavirus tracking and vaccine safety analysis. Last year, the company brokered lucrative contracts with the National Institutes of Wellness and the Nutrient and Drug Administration. It went public in September. Since and so, its stock prices have more tripled.
Source: https://theintercept.com/2021/01/30/lapd-palantir-data-driven-policing/
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