Watch the Watchers: LAPD officer database
watchthewatchers.net
watchthewatchers.net
If you try to request photos of police in Chicago, they claim to have some wild esoteric process to get the photo such that if you request any more than 5 photos, they'll deny the request it unduly burdensome because of the way to access those photos. It's... doubtful.. that that's actually the case since their badge system has photos and they just need to pull from there, but... it's tricky is all I'll say.
I have a buddy on the south side who is part of a number of local political action groups which meet at local churches and are organized by alderman.
The city is run by the mob. If people try to pull the curtain aside to expose it, they disappear. Yeah yeah, hearsay. But this is a friend of mine I trust being told directly by alderman.
I have wondered for a while why Lightfoot has taken positions on issues diametrically opposed to, like, her whole career prior.
Yeah and they are called police.
> Jon Graham Burge (December 20, 1947 – September 19, 2018) was an American police detective and commander in the Chicago Police Department who was found guilty of having "directly participated in or implicitly approved the torture" of at least 118 people in police custody in order to force false confessions.
Jon Burge Wikipedia: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jon_Burge
Obviously Jon is very dead and quite retired but you can’t really maintain your spot as the most corrupt city in the country without buy-in from police.
Neither is it clear how representative the organizers are of those law-abiding citizens generally rather than a minority mix of genuine victims of police abuse and political agitators using them.
Note this is not a criticism of representative community efforts to hold police forces to account for bad behaviour, but this particular approach seems to play an antagonistic role informed as much by political ideology as genuine concern about police overreach.
With object-detection tech being commodity, it might be easier to just deploy RPi cameras and flag any vehicle with "POLICE" vinyls on the side. They out themselves there since no civilian is driving a similar vehicle.
Undercover cars are a different matter. You'd have a hard time disambiguating service vehicles from civilian-owned. Most of those even retain the side-view spotlight. You could safely ignore any with "PRIVATE" or "SECURITY" written on the side though; the cops out themselves again since most departments don't buy slick-tops and then slap "POLICE" vinyls on it (though I think Georgia departments are compelled to do this; I've seen black vinyl lettering on black undercover cars which I assume was meant to skirt some law).
Option B: most departments outsource maintenance of their vehicles to contracted civilian mechanics. Drive around town enough and you'll probably find a lot with a bunch of police cars parked there. Plant an ALPR camera facing the lot and record plates. Then you can use ALPR around town.
the dichotomy of LA crime being out of control and LA people being so anti-cop will never fail to amuse me.
> in the first 24 days of 2015, police in the US fatally shot more people than police did in England and Wales, combined, over the past 24 years [1]
[0] https://www.tcworkerscenter.org/2018/09/wage-theft-vs-other-... [1] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/jun/09/the-counted-...
It is a common complaint that the police tend not to prevent crimes but instead just show up afterwards and at best shrug and move on (at worst they do pretty gruesome stuff like sexually harass the victim or shoot the person who called them in). So I'd agree that more police or more guns probably won't cure the causes of crime.
Your last sentence ignores the possibility that the LAPD, a department downright infamous for its police gangs, could be a contributing or even causative factor for LA crime being, as you put it, "out of control".
[0] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/07/20/the-invention-...
"State enforcers to protect the politicians and people in power have existed in every form of society" * yes.
>its like being against roads, or hospitals, or public transportation
Yes.
“This website is intended as a tool to empower community members engaged in copwatch and other countersurveillance practices. You can use it to identify officers who are causing harm in your community”
“Political” is not the slur you think it is to activists. Ironically, the belief that good social action should be some sort of pure pragmatism unsullied by politics is itself a deeply embedded neoliberal ideology.
Plenty of people are anti-police, for good reason, and that position is just as ideological as yours. It’s fair to debate that position, but it’s naive to view political agitation as some sort of sneaky sinister plot. I promise these people, least of all the “genuine victims”, aren’t concerned with whether their tactics fall outside the Overton window of centrist-approved police protests.
Isn't that what many mugshots are? It looks like LAPD at least doesn't dump them online like some places do, but even things like https://app5.lasd.org/iic/ or https://www.lapdonline.org/office-of-the-chief-of-police/pro... could be just as damaging unless records are pulled offline when people are later found to be totally innocent.
I notice that news organizations are perfectly happy to post names, photos, and other information about suspects, but much less likely to publish information about police officers. I can't help but wonder if something like this watch the watchers site would even be seen as necessary if any search engine could do the job just as well.
If you are a law-abiding citizen that wants a good police force, accountability needs to happen. And it is totally appropriate for citizens to take this into their own hands if the police departments and the political powers can't manage to make it happen. If people see that the LAPD is caught lying about cases and numbers repeatedly without consequences, what other course of action is there?
If I were a LAPD official I would see this as a sign that the public doesn't trust my numbers and I would try my best to figure out a way to change this.
A police force is provided with great power. And with great power comes great responsibility. And that responsibility is not towards your colleagues who killed innocent people, but towards the public. If you are proven to be unable to act responsibly it is in order for the public to find measures to hold you responsible. This is — by nature — political, but I don't think it is divisive.
A responsible police force should be in the interest of every political orientation, unless we are talking about authotarian or fascist movements — and then you got an entirely different set of problems, because they don't believe in the rule of law to begin with.
I 100% believe you, and if I was an LAPD official I would feel the same way. However police themselves probably won’t react like this. I don’t think the existence of this tool in and of itself will scare them into behaving better - they’ll probably just try their best to work around it (take a more lenient position of hidden/obscured badge numbers, slow roll FOIA requests, idk), try to shut it down legally or harass the people behind it.
Don’t get me wrong it’s a good tool to have at your disposal and I think it’ll probably still help some LA residents with cases against the LAPD somehow.
disclaimer: I don't live in LA, have never interacted with the LAPD, have never even been there. This comment is purely based on the impression I get that some police in the USA are quite hostile towards their population and that the LAPD are one of the more notorious departments.
they pretty much certainly will not behave better. the LAPD will always exist as long as LA does, and it will always have the power.
Seeking an equivalence here also strikes me as a false equivalence - the power balance between an LAPD office and a citizen is not equal.
Would you be happy if it said “Here are tim and james, here is where they live, make them accountable!”?
The kind of power wielded by tech companies is not the same kind of power wielded by the police.
Comparing them directly in this way runs into some major false equivalence problems.
I still see major potential for abuse of such a database and I’m not claiming it is without issue.
But logging an interaction with an armed public servant who has the power to detain/arrest you, who works for an organization that has a worrisome tendency towards shooting civilians, and whose role is to be a sworn servant and protector of the public - cannot be casually compared with some vague notion of “big tech has your data”.
For sale of argument, if we did dignify that comparison, the first problem is that the vast majority of workers in tech have no such power at all. The rank and file are generally powerless. Opportunities for abuse are generally concentrated to a small number of people with access. The same cannot be said about the police force.
Here’s every officer involved shooting in Los Angeles for 2022:
https://da.lacounty.gov/reports/ois/2022
When reading the reports it seems that those shootings were not unreasonable given the circumstances.
With cops and teenagers, the only narrative you're ever going to hear is whichever one paints them in a sympathetic light.
They would never do anything to provoke a violent response from the subject, no sir. They always announce their presence loud and clear and never surprise volatile subjects. They always opt for nonlethal measures before pulling out the service weapon.
Both cliques will also stick to their story even when you discover video evidence directly contradicting it.
Police and Law Enforcement salivate at the data and control Social Media/Tech companies have.
One could look to the twitter files to see how much the US government attempted and successfully controlled a public company to push narratives of the current regime and or censor dissenting views.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter_Files
Some tinfoils out there belief the Facebook (now Facebook) was originally LifeLog.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARPA_LifeLog
The US gov and LEO have made social media a _national security issue_ which gives the government inferred power to abuse the data collected by these companies.
Of course they do, but the core point remains: the kind of power wielded is not the same. Pinterest can’t show up at your door with guns based on the things you pin. The reason police salivate is because of the possibilities unlocked by having such data while also being “the law”.
I’m in no way claiming that this power is not dangerous for other reasons in the hands of tech companies, but tech having this data means something entirely different than LEO having this data.
The implications and failure modes are quite different and worthy of examination.
If tech has the data, law enforcement has access to said data. Simple as.
Doesn’t matter what your equivalency argument is. This is problematic and opens the door to abuse.
I’m certainly not against investigating and punishing bad cops to the full extent of the law,but to post the names of all officers, many who are doing their job right and just, and many of whom are undercover? That’s ridiculous.
If the cops decide to beat your ass or follow you in reality your life is meaningfully changed, crying about post karma on reddit is so far divorced from the reality of the situation of cops killing people, stealing, and getting away with it.
My partner is an attorney and she just sued the cops for improperly looking up a specific woman tens of thousands of times, checking in on her, harassing her, following her, stalking her with his cop authority.
Now imagine the opposite, you are on reddit and someone wont stop replying to your comments, which one of these might need some accountability?
That’s like asking for every mod name to be revealed on Hacker News in order to be able to pushback against a ban.
I don’t worry about cops beating my ass. I always comply when I’m confronted and it’s amazing but they treat me with respect. I also don’t commit violent crimes, that helps as well.
In this scenario, who holds the power to downvote you to oblivion? Who makes the rules about participation relative to karma?
If you said the same things in a local bar, would you find it problematic if people disagreed with you or maybe decided not to talk to you?
To find the behavior of privately moderated community groups more problematic than the behavior of bad cops - behavior that ruins or ends thousands of lives every year - seems like a major misalignment.
> Doesn’t matter what your equivalency argument is. This is problematic and opens the door to abuse.
In a discussion comparing things, equivalency always matters. The world is filled with systems, communities, and organizations that are wide open to abuse. That potential is not by itself an equalizing factor.
You mean kind of like LinkedIn?
Of course LinkedIn has the whole consent thing going for it, people make their accounts there willingly (if we ignore the whole address-book farming they do/did). On the other hand the typical LinkedIn profile contains way more information, about people who are way less critical to public safety. But neither this LAPD database nor LinkedIn tell you where people live.
There's probably 100 recruiter companies.
I grew up during Reaganomics
When Ice T was out there on his killing cops shit
Or Rodney King was getting beat on
And they let off every single officer
And Los Angeles went and lost it
Now every month there's a new Rodney on YouTube
It's just something our generation is used to
It would help us make it clear to each other what can be expected. Keeps us a bit more honest about who and what we are. It gives us a place to start from if that "no chance for justice" situation ever changes, and could maybe even help others who haven't gotten to the point we have to avoid our fate. Wouldn't you think that even if it never protects any one of us today, history and the rest of the world should know about what was being done to us?
As for a website like this, maybe police will push back against it, exposing their hypocrisy in the process. Or maybe it'll cause a few people to think about why surveillance is acceptable when it's being done to them, but not acceptable when it's police officers. Or maybe somebody learns about all the bad apples and seeing example after example eventually feels outraged enough to push a little harder for meaningful changes.
I don't see the harm in it anyway.
> documenting police abuses.
Whats not to understand? The police do not do a good job of policing themselves.
Citizens have a responsibility to ensure their police forces do not become tyrants.
>It’s pointless to do all this documenting without a way to turn it into accountability.
The light of public attention is the first step to accountability. Copwatchers gather the evidence that will eventually result in a conviction of those who abuse their position as police officers.
That is the point. How is this so hard to understand?
> there are never consequences
This is false. There are many, many cases of bad cops going to jail because a concerned citizen got them on camera, violating their position.
Unless you go looking for these cases, though, you won't see any. Policing in America has gotten too powerful. The only effective thing to do about it, is for citizens to turn their cameras on and start documenting the abuses, far and wide.
https://archive.org/details/LAPDRosterSortedByNameFebruary20...
All the headshots can easily be extracted by appending "https://watchthewatchers.net/headshots/" to the values from the "imagePath" value in the JSON dump.
https://i.imgur.com/nbhL64L.png
It took a while to load for me, so I'm posting this to spare the site from the HN hug of death, even if just a little bit.
I abused this trick to perform local fuzzy searches for usernames, results would update with no delay on every keypress, the competing devs were so blown away and couldn't tell how I did it lol.
Best exploit ever. It wouldn't have scaled but it was still so funny to see everyone else's reactions.
You'll probably miss some names like McLovin.