Stop LAPD Spying Coalition — PredPol and LASER abolition (2018–2020)

The Stop LAPD Spying Coalition's campaign to abolish predictive policing in Los Angeles is the first US grassroots campaign to successfully dismantle a major municipal predictive-policing program through community-led research, public records litigation, and sustained organizing. The coalition — a community-power-building group operating from the Los Angeles Community Action Network on Skid Row — formally launched its data-driven policing campaign in 2016, targeting two LAPD programs that together constituted the city's predictive policing infrastructure: PredPol, a place-based algorithmic system that forecast crime hot spots on a 500-by-500-foot city-wide grid, and Operation LASER (Los Angeles Strategic Extraction and Restoration), a person-based program that used Palantir technology to maintain a secret database of residents designated "chronic offenders" for intensified patrol contact. By April 2020, both programs had been ended. The campaign's decisive arc — running from the coalition's 2018 foundational report through the 2019 public records lawsuit victory and 2019–2020 program terminations — is documented by MIT Technology Review as a model of community-led algorithmic accountability that preceded the broader 2020 movement moment against predictive policing.

The coalition and its frame

The Stop LAPD Spying Coalition was founded in 2011 by Hamid Khan, a community organizer with more than 35 years of experience on Skid Row and in Los Angeles' Koreatown neighborhood. The coalition began by targeting LAPD's Suspicious Activity Reporting (SAR) program before expanding its scope to the predictive policing programs that LAPD launched in 2011. Khan and the coalition operate explicitly as abolitionists: their argument is not that predictive systems need better oversight or more transparent auditing but that they automate and scale discriminatory policing practices that treat entire communities as criminal threats, and that no technical reform can fix a structural problem. This abolitionist frame set the coalition apart from other tech-accountability efforts — Khan declined partnerships with groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation over what he characterized as a philosophical disagreement about whether reform or abolition was the appropriate goal. The coalition's six-point demand — immediate ban, abolition of existing surveillance technology, prohibition on new surveillance tech acquisition, disclosure and notification, reparations for rights violations, and redirection of surveillance funding toward community investments — was formalized in the 2018 report and held consistently through the campaign's duration.

"Before the Bullet Hits the Body" and the first public hearings

The campaign's decisive escalation began in spring 2018 when the coalition published Before the Bullet Hits the Body: Dismantling Predictive Policing in Los Angeles — a community research report analyzing both LASER and PredPol as a unified architecture of discriminatory surveillance. The report characterized predictive systems as "inherently flawed and racist by design," examined how LASER's Chronic Offender designations and PredPol's hot-spot grids concentrated police contact on Black and Brown communities and homeless residents, and named the academic and corporate actors — particularly UCLA professor Jeff Brantingham, a PredPol co-creator — as complicit in producing a tool whose social harm flowed from its design rather than from any technical flaw. The 2018 report directly triggered the first public hearings on data-driven policing ever held by a US city, convened by the City of Los Angeles in response to community pressure from the coalition — a significant procedural victory in a campaign where LAPD had consistently refused public accountability for either program.

Public records litigation and the disclosure of LAPD's secret lists

Parallel to the public hearing campaign, the coalition pursued disclosure of LAPD's operational records through California's Public Records Act. The coalition's first CPRA request was filed on May 10, 2017; LAPD repeatedly missed the statutory response deadlines over the following nine months. On February 13, 2018, the coalition filed suit against LAPD and the City of Los Angeles to compel disclosure. The litigation produced a landmark result: in December 2019, LAPD was forced to release 679 names from its secret Chronic Offender database, along with hundreds of documents covering LASER Zone maps, micro-hot-spot designations, grants, internal reports, and the Community Safety Operation Centers infrastructure running on Palantir. The disclosed documents allowed the coalition to identify connections between LASER Zones — the geographic areas where Chronic Offenders were subject to intensified patrol contact — and police killings of seven community members: Jesse Romero, Richard Richer, Kenny Watkins, Keith Bursey, Daniel Perez, Grechario Mack, and Robert Diaz. The coalition characterized the disclosure as the first comprehensive public exposure of how predictive policing functioned in practice in Los Angeles, and used the documents to ground subsequent organizing and academic coalition work.

The 450 academics letter and dismantlement of LASER

In October 2019, the coalition organized a letter signed by over 450 academics — faculty and students from UCLA and universities across the United States — rejecting the intellectual foundations of PredPol and challenging the "ethics and merits" of Jeff Brantingham's research, characterizing predictive policing as carrying the "troubling legacies of anthropology and social sciences" in the service of discriminatory systems. The letter arrived as the coalition's earlier demand for an inspector general audit of LASER was producing results: in March 2019, the LAPD inspector general released an audit concluding that Operation LASER could not be properly audited because its operations were too complex to evaluate — a finding that confirmed the coalition's core transparency critique and removed LAPD's principal defense of the program. LASER was dismantled in April 2019, with the inspector general audit widely cited as the proximate cause.

The end of PredPol and the disputed narrative

LAPD's announcement on April 21, 2020 that it would cease all predictive policing programs effective immediately came with an official explanation that framed the decision as financially driven: an April 15 internal memo from Chief Michel Moore cited the city's COVID-19 budget crisis and an "immediate freeze of new contractual agreements" as the reason for ending the PredPol contract. Hamid Khan disputed this account directly: "This was clearly the community rising up," he said, stating that organizing — not the pandemic — had produced the result. The coalition's interpretation is supported by the multi-year campaign record: the public hearings, the inspector general's damaging audit findings, the public records litigation disclosure, the academics' letter, and a wider media and academic consensus that PredPol's own internal audits had failed to demonstrate that the software reduced crime. LAPD's contract with PredPol had begun in 2011; its cancellation in 2020 came after a sustained campaign that the department had spent years resisting.

Place in the corpus

The campaign occupies a distinct position in the corpus as the first US instance of a grassroots community-led campaign that directly and successfully abolished a major predictive-policing program. It closes two coverage gaps: first, no US campaign entry previously covered the predictive-policing abolition arc, which was a precursor to the broader 2020 movement against algorithmic policing that the corpus covers through other entries; second, the Los Angeles area has limited corpus representation despite being a central site of US tech-accountability organizing. The coalition's abolitionist frame — its explicit rejection of reform in favor of abolition, its critique of academic complicity, and its use of public records litigation as a community transparency tool alongside street-level organizing — is also methodologically distinct from the other US algorithmic-accountability campaigns in the corpus, most of which operate within a regulatory or litigation frame rather than an abolitionist one. Hamid Khan's 35-year organizing background in Los Angeles' most policed communities, and the coalition's base in Skid Row, ground the campaign in the geography of displacement and over-policing in ways that distinguish it from campaigns led by policy organizations or digital-rights groups.