THREAD. Have you ever wondered exactly what it looks like when police work with real estate developers to target the poorest people in our society? Here is a story just revealed from City of Los Angeles emails that should shake you to the core.
The story starts when the LAPD's "Neighborhood Prosecutor" meets one of the leading developers in Chinatown. The two begin *strategizing together* about how to use cops to target a specific unhoused activist. Here's what the report says: automatingbanishment.org/section/3-real…
The "neighborhood prosecutor" offered city's powers to remove the unhoused person from the neighborhood. The real estate developer arranged for LAPD’s Senior Lead Officer for the area to tell the unhoused person that they would get court orders to banish him from a public park.
A few months later, the developer emailed the neighborhood prosecutor and LAPD Senior Lead photographs of another unhoused Black man, referring to him as “male transient EDWARD.” What happened next is chilling.
The next day, LAPD responded: “We did facial recognition and found out his info.” Think about what is happening here.
This should scare us all. Across US, police intelligence and counterinsurgency units are working secretly with profiteering real estate developers and tech companies to build a surveillance state backed by the ubiquitous threat of legal violence. Why do you think they do that?
I urge everyone to read the report by @stoplapdspying which has many similar examples. Automated Banishment is one of the most important and rigorous studies you will ever read on any of these issues. And it comes from the targeted community itself. automatingbanishment.org/index.html
You should follow @stoplapdspying if you want the most intellectually rigorous analysis coming directly from the people living in Skid Row and most actively targeted by police. They are an amazing group of people.
A final thought. This report and these emails raise profound questions about what kind of society we live in, and the forces that profit from controlling us. We should ask: why was this report was almost entirely ignored by news outlets?
https://twitter.com/equalityAlec/status/1464270507310727171
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