![]() These reports reveal the LAPD’s priorities for allocating its personnel and time. ![]() Second, the documents that Petering received include two days’ worth of “special events and situational awareness” updates produced by the LAPD’s communications shop and forwarded to multiple divisions within the police department. Stop LAPD Spying has already filed a public records request to learn more about this tool and the scope of the LAPD’s surveillance. This raises questions about whether the LAPD fully disclosed the tools it has used for social media monitoring. First, the vendor that produced the alert, NC4, did not appear in the thousands of pages of documents the Brennan Center received from our initial public records request. The incident was revealing in at least two other ways, however. And there’s no indication of whether or for how long these alerts get saved, but if they’re retained for even a day - and they were clearly retained for longer than that since the LAPD was able to produce them for Petering - they effectively rewrite the official history, obscuring the truth in favor of a narrative that this gathering of concerned community members somehow posed a threat. The LAPD has a history of monitoring the Twitter posts of its critics and collecting the social media information of every person they stop and interview on the street regardless of whether they’re even suspected of a crime. Worst of all, it makes it seem like we were potential criminals - all because we had the temerity to criticize the LAPD. to handle “disruptions,” possibly putting any responding officer into an aggressive mindset. It makes it seem like there was the possibility that police would have to respond to Robinson S.P.A.C.E. It makes it seem like what we were doing was wrong. But what’s truly scary is the tone of this alert. There’s no reason an alert should have been issued. ![]() There’s no reason Stop LAPD Spying Coalition’s social media feed should have been surveilled, and certainly not on behalf of a law enforcement agency. There are many alarming things about this “alert” outside of the analyst’s misunderstanding of what “alleged” means. occur” in the area as the result of a PowerPoint presentation? But this line takes the cake: “Stop LAPD Spying Coalition has organized the demonstration to protest alleged LAPD social media surveillance” (emphasis added). LA police stations - would be “impacted.” And how could “associated disruptions. There was no chance that any “assets” - a.k.a. We didn’t “plan to hold a demonstration.” We had a community meeting. We weren’t “protesters” - though I’ve been proud to be a protester in the past - but people exercising our constitutional rights inside a community space. It’s easy to laugh something like this off since it’s so absurd, but it’s a little harder when you take a close look at the alert - however contradictory and foolish it is. Yet in late August, one of the cofounders of the Robinson S.P.A.C.E., Robin Petering, discovered something interesting after filing a Public Records Act request for any LAPD emails mentioning the event location: a company that apparently monitors social media and provides alerts to the LAPD had taken note of our little constitutionally protected gathering and issued an alert. People listened and asked questions as I and several other panelists, including a Guardian journalist who coauthored powerful pieces explaining and contextualizing the documents we received, discussed the LAPD’s misuse of social media monitoring tools. ![]() It was the coalition’s weekly Tuesday night community meeting, with a little extra energy in the room because it was the first in-person meeting since Covid-19 began in March 2020. The event couldn’t have been more ordinary from a bystander’s perspective. The event was held at the Robinson S.P.A.C.E, a community-run outfit that provides free space for progressive local organizations in Los Angeles. The Stop LAPD Spying Coalition invited me because the Brennan Center had obtained over 10,000 pages of documents about the LAPD’s use of social media - and with them, an unprecedented window into the department’s surveillance of activists and communities of color.
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