Sgt. Jerretta Sandoz, veteran officer and the first black director of the Los Angeles Police Protective League, the union that represents LAPD officers.
Sgt. Jerretta Sandoz, veteran officer and the first black director of the Los Angeles Police Protective League, the union that represents LAPD officers.
Lt. Perry Griffith, head of the detective section of the Southwest Area Division, at his office. (click on image to play/pause audio)
Perry Griffith’s first contact with a police officer came when he was 17 years old and driving around with his friends in his mother’s car.
“He stopped us and said, ‘Hey, you’re in your mom’s car. You know you shouldn’t be here.’ He was very polite,” he said. While many African Americans like him have negative experiences with police officers, he said that that conversation gave him “a different perspective of what a police officer is.”
He went on to study criminal administration and after graduating, joined the Los Angeles Police Department. A veteran of nearly three decades, he has spent most of his career serving in stations across South Los Angeles, a region with a high rate of violent crime and gang activity. Today he is a lieutenant and the commanding officer of the detective section of the Southwest Division — one of the 21 geographic area divisions of the LAPD.
“If we can avoid the robberies, the gang shootings from happening, that’s a win in itself”
Luis Barrera
“When I first became a police officer, we were very tuned to district policing. I was assigned an area...and I was accountable for all the crimes in that area,” he said. “After the 1992 riots, we became very involved in community policing. We told the community how we would police them...and also had an opportunity to ask them, ‘Well, how do you want to be policed?’”
“If we can avoid the robberies, the gang shootings from happening, that’s a win in itself”
Luis Barrera
Involving residents in developing practices helped bridge the gap between communities and law enforcement, Griffith said.
“The last 13 years is kind of when we got into computers and started to laser-concentrate on specific crime trends. We call it ‘smart policing,’” he said.
Spearheading this new approach is a staff of “crime analysts” who are assigned to every LAPD division.
A crime analysis map for thefts in the Southwest Area generated by LAPD’s CAMS system. The diamonds mark the location of each theft. (click on image to enlarge)
Luis Barrera reports to the Southwest station every morning at 5 a.m. His job as senior intelligence officer is to analyze crime reports from the previous week, map them and spot trends, and then relay the information over to his superiors who instruct detectives or deploy patrol units accordingly.
“It gives the officers direction. They don’t have to go out and wait for that 911 call...The biggest thing is to deter; if crime doesn’t occur, that’s a plus, right?” said Barrera. “If we can avoid the robberies, the gang shootings from happening, that’s a win in itself.”
Sometimes he also uses PredPol, a crime analysis software developed by a team of social scientists and mathematicians, led by Jeffrey Brantingham, a professor of anthropology at the University of California, Los Angeles.
“Most people think that cities are organized into high crime areas and low crime areas. The truth on the ground however is much more complicated because on a day-to-day basis, where crime occurs is highly dynamic,” said Dr. Brantingham.
“If we are looking at a map and in one week we have seven stabbings at 7th and San Pedro, we know where to deploy resources to try to curb the problem”
Deon Joseph
“There’ll be a cluster of crimes on street segments that'll shift to some other location within a matter of hours or days. So for the police that are in those places on a day-to-day basis, they have a real challenge of allocating their time to prevent those crimes.”
Brantingham and his team contend that while crimes may seem random, all of them have a certain degree of predictability. For instance, a parking lot will likely have a higher number of burglaries from vehicles and taking into account similar “crime generators” can help law enforcement focus on certain areas, the UCLA academic said.
“If we are looking at a map and in one week we have seven stabbings at 7th and San Pedro, we know where to deploy resources to try to curb the problem”
Deon Joseph
Predpol takes three components from LAPD crime reports: location, time and type of crime. It then spits out “hotspots” of 500 square feet where a crime is likely to occur at any given moment. At present PredPol is used by the LAPD only to predict property crimes.
The numbers-heavy approach to policing is perhaps best reflected in a “crime control meeting.” Every Monday and Wednesday, Lt. Griffith, together with the two other commanding officers of the division, Capt. Leland Sands and Capt. Alex Baez, meet with the lead detective of every section to discuss the status of ongoing cases and new incidents.
Dr. Jeffrey Brantingham, the leader of the team that created Predpol, at his office in the University of California, Los Angeles. (click on image to play/pause audio)
Every year each division sets a goal for reducing crimes in each category per week, Lt. Griffith explained. Individual officers and the division as a whole are then tasked with meeting the goals.
On one of the walls of the meeting room hangs a map of the division with some blocks marked in shades of crimson and yellow, much like seismic maps — “LASER zones.”
Around a decade ago, with aid from a federal grant, the LAPD signed on to a pioneering data-driven policing model to stem violent crimes — the Los Angeles Strategic Extraction and Restoration, or Project LASER. At regular intervals throughout the year, crime analysts scour through data of violent crime incidents and identify certain locations where a violent crime is more likely to occur.
“If we are looking at a map and in one week we have seven stabbings at 7th and San Pedro, we know where to deploy resources to try to curb the problem,” said Officer Deon Joseph of the Central Division.
“Anything that reduces the amount of time that officers are away from the community and patrolling is good”
Jerretta Sandoz
While the methodology to designate LASER zones is complex, the idea behind it carries over from more traditional statistical crime modeling tools like COMPSTAT.
“COMPSTAT has been around for a while and it was a way to target different crime trends within an area...and pretty much the only thing that has changed is the name and it’s now called ‘LASER zones’,” said Sgt. Jerretta Sandoz, a director of the Los Angeles Police Protective League, the union that represents LAPD officers.
“Anything that reduces the amount of time that officers are away from the community and patrolling is good”
Jerretta Sandoz
Sgt. Sandoz grew up in South Los Angeles and has served on the force for 25 years in roles as varied as patrol officer, homicide and narcotics detective and even on the Internal Affairs Division.
“Anything that reduces the amount of time that officers are away from the community and patrolling is good,” she said. “What we want is that we have the time to...talk to kids on the street to make sure that they make the right choices and I think data-driven policing frees up some time to do that.”
Until last year, Project LASER also had a person-based component that produced weekly lists of “chronic offenders” that were likely to commit a violent crime. The information about the people on the list would then be forwarded to patrol officers and specialized units (homicide, gangs, narcotics, etc.) who could check up on their status and even send letters or go to their homes to inform them that the police is aware of them.
“What a chronic offender typically was, was a very active gang member [who] had multiple contacts with the Los Angeles Police Department through arrests or detention or they were a named suspect on a crime report...He’s more apt to be involved in criminal behavior than others, based on his activity,” said Lt. Griffith. “This is someone that you need to pay attention to. To not pay attention to him is doing a disservice to the people of the city.”
Last year, Project LASER was active in 16 of the LAPD’s 21 geographic area divisions with plans to expand it across the city by 2020.
Police officers swear by the efficacy of these programs, but not everyone is convinced.
“Whole communities and whole neighborhoods get criminalized...When we look at where these programs have been launched, it's primarily in the black community and in communities of color,” said Hamid Khan, an activist with the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition, one of several groups fighting for years to dismantle predictive policing.
“What these programs are doing is that they are deeming people guilty until proven innocent.”
The coalition also claimed that geographic area-based predictive policing algorithms like PredPol were a form of “digital redlining.”
“Correcting for biases is a very challenging thing because there is no accepted way in which you can do that,” said Brantingham.
“What these programs are doing is that they are deeming people guilty until proven innocent”
Hamid Khan
“What these programs are doing is that they are deeming people guilty until proven innocent”
Hamid Khan
“[If] you’re trying to make sure that your predictions are equitably distributed across racial and ethnic groups, that can actually lead to a dramatic reduction in predictive accuracy and that’s in part because the victims of crime are not evenly distributed across populations. If you try to force predictive policing to adhere to demographic parity, you're going to be missing a lot of crimes in some places.”
Despite reaching out to him several times, Dr. Craig Uchida, the brains behind Project LASER, said he was “not interested” in commenting.
What has been most controversial is the person-based predictive component of Project LASER, especially the methodology behind the creation of the list of chronic offenders.
Officer Deon Joseph in front of his patrol car at the Central station. (click on image to play/pause audio)
A bulletin about a person was created by assigning points to an individual deemed by an analyst to be “active”: five points for each time a person had been arrested or were involved in gun-related incidents in the previous two years, whether they were related to a gang, and whether they were on probation or parole. Additionally, a point was added for each time the person was involved in a “quality” police contact.
This “work up” is done with the help of a software by a third-party company founded by Silicon Valley mogul Peter Thiel, Palantir Inc.
Courtney Bowman, a Palantir engineer, said that while the software might help officers identify the number of times a person has committed an offense, unlike what many news reports would have a reader believe, Palantir does not generate the lists; they are done externally by analysts — a fact that Lt. Griffith confirmed.
“We do not provide predictive policing capabilities to the LAPD...The software is not magically generating some set of insights that points to a potential criminal,” said Bowman.
“If you try to force predictive policing to adhere to demographic parity, you're going to be missing a lot of crimes in some places”
Jeffrey Brantingham
“So what typically entails our work with the Los Angeles Police Department is working with the [different] datasets and databases that...agencies like LAPD have and integrating that into Palantir so that they can access that information in a single platform.”
He likened the software’s use to a detective writing down leads in his notepad and then sorting through records to follow-up on them, except the detective can now accomplish that with a few clicks. Palantir does not collect data separately and whatever data is used is fed by the client itself, Bowman said.
According to documents obtained by the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition through a public records request, the datasets that are plugged in to Palantir are LAPD’s internal Crime Analysis and Mapping System, records of arrests, warrants and traffic citations, and even automated vehicle license plate readers. An officer can also access similar databases from the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department.
“If you try to force predictive policing to adhere to demographic parity, you’re going to be missing a lot of crimes in some places”
Jeffrey Brantingham
The person-based program give an excuse to the police to repeatedly harass people just because they might have a criminal record in their past, even if they are trying to move on with their lives, Hamid Khan said. He also pointed out that there is no definition of what a “quality police contact” entails and a person may have points added to their name even if an officer finds nothing after stopping them.
“It’s not racial profiling, it’s criminal profiling”
Deon Joseph
“None of what we do is racially driven,” said Officer Joseph. ”Disparity doesn’t always equal bias. Sometimes it’s just a level of criminality in one community versus another and it has nothing to do with skin color. It’s the level of crime in the community that drives our efforts to be visible, to enforce, to make arrests so we can keep crime down.”
An LAPD squad car parked outside the Our Savior Parish, a block away from the University of Southern California campus.
“They saturate black and brown communities with police. They arrest us more, they convict us more. The data is racist in itself and so it's going to spit out biased outcomes,” said Anthony Robles, a formerly incarcerated 25-year-old Latino activist with the Youth Justice Coalition.
People living in areas with a high police presence are more likely to be stopped than people in other areas, setting up a feedback loop that will mark those neighborhoods as more prone to crime, Robles said. He also said that police often frisk people for frivolous reasons — which he experienced while growing up in a neighborhood with high gang activity.
“Around eight years ago, I was put in the back of a police car and they were running my name on their computer...At the bottom I saw, it said ‘Tagging Crew Member,” said Robles. “It explained why there were always pulling me over. It was because they're keeping tabs on me.”
“Society needs to make hard decisions on how much of our civil liberties we are willing to give up for our safety”
Perry Griffith
As a teenager, Robles was stopped by the police “at least once a week.” They would pat him down, ask questions about where he lived, what he was doing and whether he had gang tattoos, he said. When asked why they stopped him, they would often not give a reason.
After sustained pressure from activist groups like the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition and the Youth Justice Coalition, the LAPD temporarily suspended the person-based component of Project LASER in August, 2018.
An audit by the Office of the Inspector General, published last month, found that chronic offenders were not selected uniformly across the divisions. While some did not use a points system and went by referrals of detectives and patrol officers, others included those with records of only non-violent offenses. Some 112 made the list even though they had no points assigned to them and about half of the 637 people in the database had no arrest record for a gun-related crime.
“What the programs are not supposed to do is create a whole bunch of [police] stops that are unnecessary. But they are incredibly important” said Steve Soboroff, president of the Los Angeles Police Commission, the civilian oversight body that votes on policy, rules on officer misconduct and in Soboroff’s words, “hires and fires the chief.”
“Society needs to make hard decisions on how much of our civil liberties we are willing to give up for our safety”
Perry Griffith
On April 10, LAPD Chief Michael Moore announced that the force will be scrapping the existing person-based program and instead focus on people recently released from prison, or those having a record of committing violent crimes.
“These steps are gradual and need to be reviewed all the time. They are written in pencil, not in stone,” said Soboroff.
Anthony Robles, an activist with the Youth Justice Coalition, at Chuco's Justice Center in Inglewood. (click on image to play/pause audio)
Moore also announced that the department will be working with researchers and academics to improve the efficacy of geography-based predictive policing algorithms and that “precision policing” manuals would be completed over summer to implement greater oversight and provide a uniform, centralized model.
Activists however said that the new precision policing model is just another name for existing programs and reflects the controversial criminal theory of “broken windows.”
“If you get out of prison early you give up some of your civil liberties...any law enforcement officer can come and search your person or your residence or your vehicle for any contraband,” said Lt. Griffith.
“We don’t want them to re-offend and we don’t want them to have to go back to prison. You could see it as being aggressive, but...the only way that we can make sure that they’re successful is we got to check them.”
Lt. Griffith’s message to critics: “Society needs to make hard decisions on how much of our civil liberties we are willing to give up for our safety.”