Automating Banishment

"Automating Banishment" is the Skid Row-anchored grassroots-organising framing through which the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition's Land and Policing Workgroup names data-driven policing as an apparatus of land dispossession rather than as a (failed or improvable) crime-prediction technology. The framing was crystallised in the Coalition's November 2021 report of the same title (subtitle The Surveillance and Policing of Looted Land) — fifteen months in the making, authored through the Coalition's Land and Policing Workgroup by "over two dozen individuals and several organizations" — and operates simultaneously as a report-title framing, an analytical-frame for the Coalition's standing campaign register, and a working civil-society vocabulary through which the US grassroots anti-data-driven-policing field names the substantive purpose of the LAPD's algorithmic-policing apparatus.

Origin and authoring body

The framing was released by the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition on 9 November 2021 and carried into the Los Angeles release announcement on 19 November 2021 by the Western Regional Advocacy Project as one of its anti-displacement organising partners. The report was produced through the Coalition's Land and Policing Workgroup as a fifteen-months-in-the-making community-based-research artefact "envisioned, researched, drafted, and edited by over two dozen individuals and several organizations." The Coalition framed the report as anchored in a "collective study, community-based research, direct action" methodology that treats research and abolition organising as a single line of work, with the Coalition itself sitting as the framing's institutional carrier — a Skid Row-based community group fiscally sponsored by the Los Angeles Community Action Network, whose multi-year campaigns against Operation LASER (cancelled by the LAPD in 2019) and PredPol (cancelled by the LAPD in 2020) supply the operational record on which Automating Banishment opens its frame.

Within this corpus's typology, the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition is recorded as a Local Group — the city-scoped grassroots-organising type — rather than as an Organization. The schema's originating_org field, defined as accepting Organization-typed IDs only, accordingly is left empty here; the framing's authoring body is named in prose throughout this entry and is reachable by entity-link to the Local Group record. Per the msg-pause-giant-ai-experiments and msg-banthescan precedent for messages whose authoring body sits structurally outside the field's type constraint, the working public life of the framing is anchored in prose-and-body-link rather than through a frontmatter cross-reference.

The five mechanisms — banishment, containment, blight, extraction, elimination

The framing's substantive register is the report's argument that the LAPD's data-driven policing apparatus operates as five interlocking purposes against Black, brown, and unhoused communities in Los Angeles, named in the report's Introduction:

• Banishment — "removing us from our homes and communities" — the centring mechanism the framing names. The Coalition's working definition of banishment, attributed to Los Angeles Community Action Network co-founder Pete White and reproduced on the report's home page, distinguishes the term from displacement on a definitional axis: "Displacement is when you have somewhere else to go. Banishment is when there is nowhere, except jail or death."
• Containment — "restricting us from the areas police want to secure for gentrification" — the mechanism by which policing organises spatial access to gentrifying districts, with Part 4 of the report (Containment, Development, & the Fight for Freedom in Skid Row) supplying the case-study analysis on Skid Row.
• Blight — "targeting areas for neglect in order to maintain racial and class hierarchies" — the mechanism by which deliberate withdrawal of public services in policed districts compounds the spatial logic of containment.
• Extraction — "exploiting our wealth, labor, or resources" — the mechanism by which surveillance and policing generate revenue (fines, fees, court costs) and convert criminalised labour into a captive workforce for the carceral and gig economies.
• Elimination — "killing or incarcerating our people" — the mechanism the Coalition names as the apparatus's outermost purpose, against which the rest of the framing's analytical register sits.

The Coalition's working argument across the five mechanisms is that data-driven policing is not a (failed-by-its-own-criteria, biased-in-its-training-data, improvable-by-fairness-corrections) crime-prediction technology, but an apparatus that automates a much older repertoire of settler-colonial, genocidal, and enslavement-rooted policing tactics at municipal scale. The frame's analytical contribution is to displace the question "is the algorithm biased?" with the question "what is the algorithm for?" — and to answer that question with a list of purposes (banishment, containment, blight, extraction, elimination) that locate algorithmic policing inside a recognised history of land-and-population governance rather than inside the public-safety register the LAPD uses to defend its programmes.

The named-systems register

The framing's working-register specificity is the named LAPD systems it analyses. The report opens its frame across Operation LASER, PredPol, Palantir, fusion centers, the Citywide Nuisance Abatement Program, and "Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design" — the LAPD's place-and-person-prediction stack, the federal-municipal intelligence framework, the property-and-tenant control framework, and the urban-design-as-policing framework respectively — and reads them as five facets of a single operational apparatus rather than as discrete tools each to be reformed on its own terms. Part 6 of the report ('Reform' of Data-Driven Policing and 'Predictive Policing 2.0') names three reformist strategies the Coalition argues serve to "obscure, accept, and broaden" the violence of data-driven policing — reframing predictive-policing systems as "using data for police accountability," standardising the systems through surveillance bureaucracy, and combining them with "community policing" programmes that draw on counterinsurgency tactics. The report's named-systems list is the working vocabulary through which the Coalition's Architecture of Surveillance platform (launched 22 October 2024) — a 52-article database mapping the LAPD's surveillance infrastructure — extends the Automating Banishment framing into the Coalition's standing analytical apparatus.

Travel and propagation

The framing has carried into four downstream registers, each anchored to a named outlet or institution.

• Abolitionist-academic public-event register. The framing's signature launch reading was the 11 February 2022 Haymarket Books panel staging the report alongside Coalition attorney-organiser Shakeer Rahman, LA CAN's Steve Diaz, geographer Deshonay Dozier (Assistant Professor, CSU Long Beach), and historian Mike Davis (Professor Emeritus, UC Riverside) — the framing's first major movement-academic public reading. Haymarket Books' framing language for the panel — that the report "examines the role of police data in real estate development and gentrification, with a focus on the process that has always bound policing and capitalism together: colonization" — anchored the framing's travel into the wider US abolitionist-press circuit.
• US Black-radical-press register. Black Agenda Report's January 2022 coverage carried the framing into the US Black-radical-press circuit, with the outlet's framing that the report names surveillance as a force that "supercharges the violence of policing, enabling deep coordination between those who seek to criminalize our communities, to transform land, and to displace and banish our people."
• Progressive-legal-academic register. The Coalition's own 15 March 2022 essay on the Law and Political Economy Project blog extended the framing into a counterinsurgency-of-reform argument — that nonprofit reform advocacy "must be understood as a form of counterinsurgency" that absorbs and neutralises abolitionist resistance rather than fundamentally challenging policing structures — anchoring the framing into the US progressive-legal-academic public-essay register.
• Federal-academic and surveillance-technology research-field register. The Social Science Research Council's Just Tech citation entry inducted the report into the surveillance-technology research-field index, and the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine's Law Enforcement Use of Predictive Policing Approaches workshop proceedings cited the report's "architecture of data-driven policing" chapter (pp. 6–23) in Appendix C of the federal scholarly record on predictive-policing approaches. The two citations together carry the framing from movement-press circulation into the cited scholarly record on the same field.

Place in movement

The framing sits as the corpus's anchor for US grassroots data-driven-policing critical framings on the abolitionist-analytical register — distinct from the US algorithmic-accountability register the Algorithmic Justice League carries on the federal-research-and-advocacy axis (anchored on the coded-gaze framing of bias in facial-recognition training data and the participatory community-reporting register), and distinct from the US sector-specific tech-worker-organising register against state-deployed AI carried on the msg-no-tech-for-ice and msg-no-tech-for-apartheid lineage. Where the algorithmic-accountability register asks how the algorithm's outputs differ across demographic groups, Automating Banishment asks what the apparatus the algorithm serves is for — and answers with the five-mechanisms list (banishment, containment, blight, extraction, elimination) that locates data-driven policing inside settler-colonial and racial-capitalist governance rather than inside a public-safety frame. The framing's structural sibling on the Latin-American side is the msg-data-colonialism framing carried by Derechos Digitales and Coding Rights, which names the AI-and-data extraction layer of the same broader settler-colonial frame from a regional Global-South starting point; the two framings share the analytical move of refusing to read AI-and-data as a neutral technological field and instead reading it as the latest configuration of an older repertoire of dispossession.

The framing's downstream impact within the US movement landscape sits in the Coalition's 2019–2020 double-win against Operation LASER and PredPol — the corpus's earliest operational-cancellation case-study in the algorithmic-accountability movement area, predating the data-centre-fight victories the corpus tracks on the physical-infrastructure side by half a decade — and in the framing's continued life through the Coalition's Architecture of Surveillance project, through which the Automating Banishment register has been carried forward into the Coalition's standing analytical apparatus on the LAPD's broader surveillance stack.

Why it has carried

Three features have made the framing durable across the four-and-a-half years since its November 2021 release.

First, the framing's two-word title encodes the substantive analytical move in a working register that can carry without rewriting. "Automating banishment" applied to data-driven policing names both what the apparatus is (an automation layer) and what the apparatus does (banishment of Black, brown, and unhoused communities from gentrifying districts) in a single phrase, in the same condensed shape that adjacent framings of the same period — Coded Gaze on the federal-research register, Fuck the Algorithm on the UK-protest register — have used to consolidate themselves into a working civil-society vocabulary.

Second, the framing has converted the Coalition's fifteen-year operational record against Operation LASER and PredPol into an analytical authority that the framing's later academic and federal-scholarly citation life sits on. The Coalition is not a research institute that has theorised data-driven policing from outside the field; it is a Skid Row-anchored grassroots-organising body whose Inspector General-audit pressure, public mobilisation, and community-based research produced two of the US's earliest operational-cancellation outcomes against an active municipal predictive-policing apparatus. The framing carries the organising authority of that record with it.

Third, the framing's five-mechanisms structure (banishment, containment, blight, extraction, elimination) supplies a working vocabulary that organising partners, scholars, journalists, and movement-academic public-event venues can pick up without translation. The Coalition's Architecture of Surveillance platform, the Black Agenda Report's January 2022 coverage, Haymarket Books' February 2022 panel, the Coalition's March 2022 LPE essay, and the National Academies' 2024 workshop proceedings citation each carry the framing's working register into a different audience without rewriting the underlying argument. The combined shape has converted Automating Banishment from a November 2021 Coalition report-title into a working US-grassroots civil-society analytical register through which the abolitionist line on data-driven policing is now organised, alongside the parallel data-colonialism framing the Latin American digital-rights field carries on the regional Global-South side and the coded-gaze framing the US algorithmic-accountability field carries on the federal-research-and-advocacy side.