Before the Bullet Hits the Body: Dismantling Predictive Policing in Los Angeles

Before the Bullet Hits the Body: Dismantling Predictive Policing in Los Angeles is the May 2018 community research report produced by the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition, the Skid Row-based Los Angeles community coalition organising for the abolition of police surveillance since 2011. It is the foundational publication-side artefact of the Coalition's campaign to abolish LAPD's two predictive-policing programmes — Operation LASER and PredPol — and the document that directly triggered the first public hearings on data-driven policing held by any US city. The corpus's entry point for the US grassroots predictive-policing abolition register, it is the first publication in the corpus to ground algorithmic-accountability analysis in an abolitionist community-organising frame targeted at the operational algorithmic-policing apparatus of a specific US municipality, and the founding research document of what the corpus records as the first US grassroots campaign to successfully dismantle a major municipal predictive-policing programme.

Background: Operation LASER and PredPol

By the mid-2010s the LAPD operated two concurrent predictive-policing programmes. Operation LASER (Los Angeles Strategic Extraction and Restoration) was a person-based programme using Palantir technology to maintain a secret database of residents designated "chronic offenders" for intensified patrol contact — a scoring system that directed police contact toward listed community members independently of any new criminal charge and from which individuals had no removal mechanism. PredPol was a place-based programme co-founded in 2012 by UCLA anthropologist Jeff Brantingham and mathematician George Mohler on an earthquake-aftershock-prediction model, generating 500-by-500-foot crime "hot spot" predictions that directed additional patrol resources to targeted city blocks. Both programmes concentrated their effects on Black, Brown, and unhoused communities across South Central Los Angeles and Skid Row and operated without meaningful public transparency or community accountability mechanism.

The Coalition had been building toward this report through its prior published output: the 2013 People's Audit examined LAPD's Suspicious Activity Reporting programme, establishing the Coalition's community-research methodology and its analysis of how LAPD's intelligence-gathering framework criminalised ordinary behaviour. The 2018 report extended that analytical line to the predictive-policing layer LAPD had been building since 2011, and brought the Coalition's findings into the public-hearing register for the first time.

Argument and approach

The report's central analytical claim is that predictive policing in Los Angeles is "inherently flawed and racist, by design" — systems whose discriminatory effects flow from the design logic itself rather than from fixable implementation failures. The report explicitly does not take a "top-down policy reform or recommendation approach" and does not seek "more 'transparency' and 'oversight' of policing" — it is positioned as an instrument for dismantling the apparatus, not improving it. The analytical architecture organises the report around four named moves: the creation of the "other" through policing categories; knowledge production and the complicity of academia (naming Jeff Brantingham's UCLA research as the intellectual infrastructure for PredPol); corporate profit and complicity (naming Palantir's Operation LASER contracting); and the "deadly impact and trauma" of predictive systems on the communities they target. The production method is the Coalition's standing framework of collective study, community-based research, and direct action — grounding findings in the experience of communities under surveillance rather than in academic or policy-audience analysis.

Hamid Khan, the Coalition's founder and coordinator and a 35-year community organizer working from Skid Row, grounded the report's abolitionist framing in an analysis of predictive policing as an apparatus rooted in structural racism and capitalist enforcement logics rather than a technical system with a correctable bias problem. The Coalition declined partnerships with reform-oriented civil-liberties organisations over the philosophical disagreement between reform-and-oversight and abolition frames — a distinction the report enacts at the level of its demands.

The six-point demand

The report formalised the Coalition's six-point demand, carried consistently through the entire 2018–2020 campaign arc: (1) immediate ban on predictive policing tactics and programmes; (2) abolition of all current surveillance technology use by law enforcement; (3) prohibition on acquiring new surveillance technology; (4) full disclosure of all surveillance deployment since inception; (5) reparations for rights violations against targeted individuals and organisations; (6) redirect surveillance funding toward community investments in housing, education, health centres, youth programmes, nutrition, and employment. The demand's structure enacts the abolitionist frame: demands 1–3 end the apparatus, demand 4 names accountability for past harm, demand 5 directs repair, and demand 6 redirects the resource the apparatus consumed toward the community needs it displaced.

Campaign outcomes

The report's release in May 2018 directly triggered the first public hearings on data-driven policing held by any US city, convened by the City of Los Angeles under community pressure. Parallel to the hearing campaign, the Coalition pursued public records disclosure: in December 2019, following a February 2018 CPRA lawsuit, LAPD was forced to release 679 names from its secret Chronic Offender database along with LASER Zone maps, micro-hot-spot designations, and hundreds of operational documents. The disclosed documents identified connections between LASER Zones and police killings of seven named community members: Jesse Romero, Richard Richer, Kenny Watkins, Keith Bursey, Daniel Perez, Grechario Mack, and Robert Diaz.

In October 2019, the Coalition organised a letter signed by over 450 academics from UCLA and universities across the United States rejecting PredPol's intellectual foundations and challenging the ethics of Jeff Brantingham's research. The same period produced the LAPD inspector general's March 2019 audit of LASER — the Coalition's own demand — concluding the programme could not be properly audited because its operations were too complex to evaluate, removing LAPD's principal defence of the programme. Operation LASER was dismantled in April 2019. PredPol was ended in April 2020; Hamid Khan attributed the decision to "the community rising up" through the sustained organising the report had anchored, directly disputing LAPD's official account that the cancellation was COVID-19-budget-driven.

Position within the corpus

Before the Bullet Hits the Body fills the predictive-policing / criminal-justice algorithmic-accountability publication slot — adjacent to Automating Inequality (welfare-and-social-services algorithmic accountability) but grounded in the US police-technology and abolition register rather than the welfare-state register. Its community-based research method and explicit abolitionist frame distinguish it from the corpus's adjacent surveillance-and-tech-accountability publications: Who's Behind ICE? documents the federal immigration-enforcement tech-supply-chain through a corporate-accountability research frame, and the Atlas of AI addresses the global critical-infrastructure and labour register. The report is the corpus's clearest instance of a movement-side research document credibly linked to the direct outcomes it sought: both the April 2019 LASER dismantlement and the April 2020 PredPol cancellation trace their immediate triggers to the campaign the report anchored, making it the publication-side anchor of the corpus's earliest US operational-cancellation case-study in the algorithmic-accountability movement area.