Thread by @stoplapdspying

Jeffrey Katzenberg, a billionaire Hollywood mogul, has been pressuring City Council to increase criminaliation of unhoused people. Katzenberg has a long history of using his obscene wealth to fund criminalization and surveillance in LA.

In 2014, Katzenberg helped fund LAPD’s body cam surveillance program. @ladailynews reported that Katzenberg was a "rich friend" of Police Commission President @SteveSoboroff, who got him to make the donation “as a way to avoid bureaucratic red tape.” dailynews.com/2014/12/22/how…

After LAPD used Katzenberg’s donation to test out body cams, the city went on to pay over $36 million on the body cam program. This is a common pattern: rich people “donate” harmful new LAPD tools, which later become budget items.

From our upcoming LAPD'S BUDGET CREEP zine:

That same pattern is how LAPD started using Palantir for its data-mining and racial profiling programs, through a donation from @Target.

Sometimes billionaires even REQUIRE the city to pick up funding after their donation expires, like @Steven_Ballmer’s @BallmerGroup did when funding LAPD's Community Safety Partnerships surveillance program.

Katzenberg wasn’t the only white elite who helped LAPD launch its body cam surveillance. LAPD paid law professors @barryfriedman1 and @m_ponomarenko to write their body cam policies. The two run a nonprofit funded by Axon, who LAPD went on to pay millions for body cam technology.

Katzenberg also brokers LAPD donations from other rich elites. In 2018, he along with @caseywasserman and @LAPDChiefMoore hosted a fundraiser for LAPD with some of the city's wealthiest elites. Every host and nearly every guest at the event was white.

LAPD's fundraising pitch for the event was that “our technology is woefully antiquated.” LAPD is one of the world's most resourced police forces, and in 2018 they were using predictive algorithms, drones, face recognition, and more. But these white people wanted to arm LAPD more.

Surveillance has always been advanced by white people getting together to decide how we will be tracked, controlled, and studied. That’s the white supremacist lineage that Katzenberg, @caseywasserman, @SteveSoboroff, @Steven_Ballmer, @barryfriedman1, and @m_ponomarenko represent.