PHOTO/STOP LAPD SPYING COALITION
LOS ANGELES — With the recent spotlight shining on the National Security Agency’s (NSA) spying apparatus, unnoticed is the government’s continued expansion of spying, surveillance, and information gathering programs in partnership with local law enforcement. One key program—the nationwide Suspicious Activity Reporting (SAR) initiative—is now active in 46 states with the participation of over 14,200 local law enforcement agencies, every federal agency, and various corporate partnerships.
Launched by the LAPD in March 2008, the SAR (Suspicious Activity Report) program, Special Order SO 1, requires all police officers to file a SAR, based on the observation of several non-criminal activities such as taking pictures, videotaping, using binoculars, and drawing diagrams. Such innocent behavior can lead to the opening of secret files, followed by a formal investigation with the file’s entry into the LAPD Major Crimes Division database. The majority of these files are also sent to fusion centers (an information gathering and sharing spy center) to be accessed by every local, tribal, campus, transit, federal law enforcement agency, and private contractors. Furthermore, in October 2009, the LAPD launched iWATCH —the “See something, Say Something” program that essentially promotes and encourages neighbors to arbitrarily report suspicious behavior.
SO1 and iWATCH assume that if you are photographing or videotaping in public you may be engaging in what is termed “pre-operational planning.” The suspicion cast on such benign, daily behaviors opens the door for racial profiling and privacy violations. It is important to realize the fundamental premise of these programs is that each and every person is a potential suspect. This concept completely contradicts the long held legal principle of innocent until proven guilty and turns it into guilty until proven innocent.
Another major concern is that the SAR program operates without applying constitutional standards of suspicion. SAR uses the standard of “reasonable indication” established under the National SAR Initiat“It tears my heart out the way my mentally ill adult son is treated by this system. I fear for his life,” says Anna Griffin in Silicon Valley, CA. “When he’s in jail, as he has been for the last two …ive (NSI) rather than the constitutional standards of “probable cause.” NSI defines suspicious activity as “observed behavior reasonably indicative of pre-operational planning of terrorism or other criminal activity.” This highly vague and overly broad standard of “reasonable indication” enables police officers to base their investigations on hunches and stereotypes. An October 2012, the US Senate Permanent Subcommittee issued a scathing report stating intelligence gathering at fusion centers, that originates from local law enforcement like LAPD, is “flawed, useless, irrelevant, duplicative.”
In 2013, the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition led a 7-month effort demanding that the LA City Human Relations Commission (HRC) hold public hearings on the LAPD SAR program. On October 10, 2013, the Los Angeles HRC passed a motion to host public hearing on LAPD’s “Suspicious Activity Reporting Program, Gang Injunctions, and other public safety issues” with the overall theme centered around profiling. This will be the first local public hearing in the nation to focus on the government’s SARs program. These hearings are tentatively scheduled to begin in late spring.
For more information please go to www.stoplapdspying.org or email us at stoplapdspying@gmail.com.
