Stop LAPD Spying Coalition

The Stop LAPD Spying Coalition is a Skid Row-based Los Angeles community coalition self-describing as "a community group building power toward abolition of the police state," founded in 2011 and fiscally sponsored by the Los Angeles Community Action Network. Its mission is to "build community power toward abolishing police surveillance" — work the Coalition frames as expanding the conversation about surveillance "beyond privacy concerns toward examining policing's deliberate harm toward Black and brown communities." The Coalition is the corpus's first US-grassroots local-group anchored on police-surveillance and algorithmic-policing organising, with a fifteen-year campaign record culminating in the LAPD's 2019 cancellation of Operation LASER and the LAPD's 2020 cancellation of PredPol — the two predictive-policing programmes the Coalition's Before the Bullet Hits the Body (2018) had identified as the standing algorithmic-policing apparatus.

Founding, base, and organising form

The Coalition was founded in 2011 in Skid Row, Los Angeles — the historically Black, unhoused-resident-dense district where the Los Angeles Community Action Network (LA CAN), the Coalition's fiscal sponsor, has long held its organising base. The Coalition's first sustained campaign was against the LAPD's Suspicious Activity Reporting (SAR) programme, the post-9/11 federal–local intelligence framework that allowed the LAPD to open secret intelligence files on residents on the basis of routinely innocent behaviour. The Coalition's SAR mobilisation page framed the programme's charge as criminalising "normal, innocent behaviors" like taking photographs or asking about business hours, and recorded that 82% of the SARs filed in the period reviewed had been on non-whites; the Coalition's The People's Audit (2013) followed as the campaign's first major publication.

The Coalition's organising form is largely volunteer, community-funded, and structured around weekly working groups and open Tuesday-night community meetings via Zoom. Its working groups carry the campaign-specific apparatus — most notably the Data-Driven Policing Work Group (which carries the predictive-policing campaigns and the Architecture of Surveillance project) and the Land and Policing Workgroup (which produced the 2021 Automating Banishment report) — and the Coalition's working method is explicitly framed as "collective study, community-based research, direct action," treating organising research and abolition organising as a single methodological line.

Predictive policing — Operation LASER and PredPol

The Coalition's signature multi-year fight has been against the LAPD's predictive-policing apparatus. By the mid-2010s the LAPD had become one of the US's largest field deployments of algorithmic-policing software, running two parallel programmes: Operation LASER, the Palantir-backed place-and-person targeting framework, and PredPol, the for-profit place-based prediction system co-founded in 2012 by UCLA anthropologist Jeff Brantingham and mathematician George Mohler on a model adapted from earthquake-aftershock prediction.

The Coalition's organising strategy across the two programmes ran along four lines.

• The community-based research line. The Coalition's May 2018 Before the Bullet Hits the Body: Dismantling Predictive Policing in Los Angeles report set the field's analytical baseline on the LAPD programmes' targeting logic, arguing that the systems' apparent neutrality masked the racist enforcement record that supplied their training data — an argument later echoed in independent investigative work documenting that PredPol "perpetuates racial biases by targeting Latino and Black neighborhoods" and in the structural-mathematics critique that "a neighborhood monitored four times as intensively can see over twenty times more false flags."
• The Inspector General audit line. Sustained Coalition pressure on the Los Angeles Police Commission and the LAPD's Office of the Inspector General produced the 2019 internal audit that found "insufficient data to determine if PredPol software helped reduce crime," the same review window in which the LAPD discontinued Operation LASER in 2019.
• The 2020 PredPol cancellation. In 2020 the LAPD discontinued PredPol — an outcome the Coalition has named as a campaign victory — in a wave that included Santa Cruz, California's June 2020 ban on predictive policing (the first US municipal ban) and the 2020 boycott of predictive-policing work by 1,500+ mathematicians that followed the George Floyd protests. PredPol later rebranded as Geolitica and was acquired by SoundThinking in August 2023, with operations ceasing by end of 2023.
• The follow-on data-driven framework line. Following the 2020 cancellation the LAPD launched a successor "Data-Informed Community-Focused Policing" framework; the Coalition's 2021 Automating Banishment report opened a multi-year analytical campaign against the framework's continuity with the cancelled programmes' underlying logic and against the LAPD's broader algorithmic-policing stack — Operation LASER, PredPol, Palantir, fusion centers, and the Citywide Nuisance Abatement Program.

Architecture of Surveillance and The Algorithmic Ecology

The Coalition's Data-Driven Policing Work Group operates the Architecture of Surveillance (AOS) platform, a 52-article database mapping LAPD's surveillance infrastructure that launched 22 October 2024 and that consolidates the Coalition's standing analytical line on the LAPD's surveillance stack. The companion Algorithmic Ecology project — a mapping tool for organising against algorithmic systems — is the Coalition's framework-side counterpart to its programme-specific campaigns, treating the LAPD's discrete algorithmic systems as a single ecology rather than as isolable tools. Adjacent investigative publications from the Coalition include a May 2023 family-policing report ("DCF(S) STANDS FOR DIVIDING AND CONQUERING FAMILIES"), a May 2022 lawsuit on the Echo Park Lake surveillance-camera deployment, and an August 2021 report on fusion centers and federal involvement in schools.

Automating Banishment — surveillance and land

Automating Banishment: The Surveillance and Policing of Looted Land (November 2021), produced by the Coalition's Land and Policing Workgroup and authored and edited by "dozens of people" through a community-based research process, anchors the Coalition's analytical thread on the relationship between data-driven policing and real-estate development. The report's frame argues that the LAPD's algorithmic-policing stack — across Operation LASER, PredPol, Palantir, fusion centers, the Citywide Nuisance Abatement Program, and the post-2020 Data-Informed Community-Focused Policing framework — operates as an apparatus of displacement and containment of Black and brown communities across Skid Row and South Central Los Angeles, with Part 5 ("Operation LASER's Racial Terror") supplying the report's signature case-study analysis. The frame supplies the Coalition's standing thesis that algorithmic policing in Los Angeles automates settler-colonial patterns of banishment rather than predicting crime in any conventional analytical sense.

Coalition role and convening footprint

The Coalition is a named coalition partner on MediaJustice's 2024 Take Back Tech II convening in Chicago — co-hosted with Mijente and drawing 450 participants from 136 US cities and 4 countries — where the Coalition led a named workshop on how public-health data and crises like the COVID-19 pandemic expand the surveillance state. Its standing coalition partners on the Take Back Tech 2024 programme included the Carceral Tech Resistance Network, Accountable Tech, the Advancement Project, Just Futures Law, and the Athena Coalition. The Coalition's national presence on the Take Back Tech 2024 programme anchors it inside MediaJustice's national surveillance-and-carceral-tech organising frame and supplies the lateral connection between the Coalition's Los Angeles-rooted campaigns and the wider US surveillance / police-tech grassroots field.

Place in movement

The Stop LAPD Spying Coalition is the corpus's first US police-surveillance and predictive-policing grassroots local-group, and the corpus's clearest case-study of grassroots organising successfully dismantling an operational US predictive-policing apparatus through a long-running combination of community-based research, Inspector General-audit pressure, public mobilisation, and coalition convening. The Coalition's organising register — police-surveillance abolition anchored on Skid Row's Black and unhoused communities and structured around the abolition of the police state rather than around the reform of individual surveillance programmes — is structurally distinct from the corpus's adjacent algorithmic-accountability and surveillance-organising registers: the Algorithmic Justice League anchors the US-federal research-and-advocacy register on face-recognition bias and community-reporting tooling; Foxglove anchors the UK strategic-litigation register on algorithmic public-administration; the Coalition supplies the third register — US-grassroots abolition-frame community organising against the operational, place-based algorithmic-policing apparatus the LAPD deploys at the city scale.

The Coalition's 2019–2020 double-win against Operation LASER and PredPol is also the corpus's earliest operational-cancellation case-study in the algorithmic-accountability movement area — predating the corpus's data-centre-fight victories (the Northern-Virginia Digital Gateway 2026 outcome, the West Texas Project Matador 2025 outcome) by half a decade — and frames the Coalition as a movement-area precedent for the broader grassroots fight against AI-infrastructure decisions later picked up by Memphis Community Against Pollution, Tigers Against Pollution, Panhandle 1st Coalition, and the Coalition to Protect Prince William County on the data-centre and physical-infrastructure side. The Coalition's induction-pattern is different from those data-centre fights: rather than entering the AI landscape through the physical-infrastructure layer, the Coalition has held a continuous fifteen-year position on the algorithmic-decisioning layer of police technology, with the make-AI-good landscape arriving at the Coalition's territory rather than the other way around.