Dear friends, check out some of the work we have been doing!
On Monday (5/23) the Coalition held our monthly Academic Complicity work group meeting where we reviewed a statement released by the Coalition in support of NYU students condemning Barry Friedman’s Policing Project. The students are demanding accountability against the NYU based non-profit for their role in sanitizing and legitimizing policing. You can read the students’ letter to the dean here, and our statement in support here.
The work group also provided updates on recent student organizing efforts that the Coalition has supported, specifically the UC Divest actions on the UCLA campus. UC Divest is a coalition of student-led organizations demanding that the UC Regents divest from Blackstone, a management firm that invests money in military technology companies, specifically technologies used by Israel to violently remove Palestinians from their homes.
On Tuesday (5/24) the Coalition held our first in-person meeting at our home in LA CAN since the start of the pandemic! The Coalition held the fourth Tuesday of the month Data Driven Policing meeting in an in-person/virtual hybrid format to accommodate folks unable to visit LA CAN. For the first hour of the meeting Hamid, Tiff, and Mamta discussed part 6 of our report Automating Banishment: the Surveillance and Policing of Looted Land, as well as how the Architecture of Surveillance is used to target and surveil specific communities.
For the second half of the meeting, Matyos and Ni continued last week’s conversation on LAPD Social Media monitoring. We worked with meeting attendees to develop questions we wanted answered about LAPD Social Media monitoring, which will then be used to create Public Records Requests to further our research. We also started conversation around what a fight back or community safety strategy could look like to counter LAPD social media infiltration tactics. You can watch a recording of our meeting here.
On Wednesday (5/25), the Coalition conducted our weekly outreach to community members in Skid Row. We spent the morning in San Julian Park discussing LAPD surveillance and passing out educational materials to community members.
Later that day we held our Defund Surveillance meeting, where we continued to go over LAPD budget documents to highlight the enormous amount of city resources spent on the surveillance technologies. The work group continues to develop popular education materials to inform people about this spending.
We then attended the Black Lives Matter Los Angeles weekly End Police Associations action to commemorate the 2 year anniversary of the murder of George Floyd.
On Thursday (5/26), our SARA work group met to provide updates on our outreach efforts and discuss future content creation. We were grateful to be joined by Cris who famously created the Automating Banishment website and interactive map, who plugged in to help us create a mapping component to our SARA materials.
On Friday (5/27), our Community Policing work group met to continue the development of materials that uplift community policing as counterinsurgency.
To plug in with any of the work groups listed above, or for more information about the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition, email us at stoplapdspying@gmail.com.
If you or your organization are interested in hosting a teach-in or discussion regarding our report please fill out this google form.
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