LAPD Helicopters Flying Overhead Don't Deter Crime. They Antagonize Minorities

By Hamid Khan, Guardian UK

15 March 15

This “preventive policing” tactic is not innovative - it’s offensive

he Los Angeles Police Department recently revealed that it is using helicopters to fly over high-crime areas as a way of deterring criminals. This tactic is being touted as “cutting edge” by the police - but it is anything but that. It will further criminalize and violate the privacy of black communities, as well as other people of color, who are already disproportionately affected by police abuses in the city.

This isn’t the first time that overhead surveillance has been used to collect information on communities of color in the greater Los Angeles area. The Atlantic revealed last year that in 2012, the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department had secretly used a civilian aircraft to spy on Compton residents, who are overwhelmingly people of color. For nine days the department collected high-resolution aerial video footage of the neighborhood, without informing the community.

There is already an overwhelming amount of racial profiling of Los Angeles’ black community - and counterterrorism programs are worsening the situation. The black community has been impacted three times more than non-black Los Angelenos by counter-terrorism programs like Suspicious Activity Reporting (SAR).

LAPD was the launching pad of the National Suspicious Activity Reporting initiative in March 2008, following the 9/11 commission report, as a counterterrorism program to help “connect the dots”. This counterterrorism program defines suspicious activity in very vague terms that encourages a speculative standard of suspicion, enabling police officers to base their interventions on hunches and stereotypes.

These policies are not limited to law enforcement personnel. Programs such as iWATCH, with the tagline “See Something, Say Something”, actively recruit community informants to report on perfectly legal activity. This fosters a culture of suspicion and fear, reinforces social biases, and racial, ethnic, and religious profiling.

According to a recent audit of the program, 30% of the people suspected of “suspicious activity” and slated for further counterterrorism investigation at “fusion centers” - which are government-run warehouses of intelligence gathering, storing and sharing - are black. That figure rises to 50% in black women, despite black communities comprising less than 10% of the city’s population.

These policing methods are promoted as a set of techniques that will allow law enforcement agencies to identify criminal threats and prevent crimes. But there is little evidence that they are effective deterrents. In 2012, a scathing Senate report called such intelligence gathering at fusion centers “flawed, useless, irrelevant” and expressed deep concern that intelligence gathering was “more often than not unrelated to terrorism”.

When LAPD Deputy Chief Michael Downing, who also heads the department’s counterterrorism bureau, was asked to comment on the Senate audit he responded by saying: “There’s a lot of white noise, but there are occasionally gold nuggets”. Yet he did not know if any of these case had led to a conviction.

At the core of this “surveillance industrial complex” lies a complex web of information gathering, storing, and sharing. LAPD’s eye in the sky is not operating in isolation but is incorporated into the department’s massive architecture of surveillance that deploys human resources and electronic equipment.

Such policies systematically incentivize racial profiling, ride roughshod over the right to privacy and erode the principle of innocent until proven guilty. By assuming certain individuals or behaviors are suspicious, this new style of speculative policing treats people as guilty until proven innocent. They are tools of social control masked by the rhetoric of national security and public safety - and there is simply no excuse for them.