PredPol is LAPD’s Racist Predictive Policing Program

This post is part of a series of zines that Free Radicals presented at Tiny Tech Zines on August 11, 2019. To see other zines in the series, click HERE.

Police departments have always used a range of technologies to facilitate their unjust targeting, overpolicing, and structural harm of Black and Brown communities. The Los Angeles Police Department uses one technology in particular, a predictive policing program called PredPol, to claim that their policing is objective and neutral. However, PredPol’s use of historic racist crime data, its focus on location-based policing in a violently segregated city, and its mere existence as a technology that must predict crime are all clear evidence to the contrary.

As part of Free Radicals’ partnership with Stop LAPD Spying coalition to dismantle PredPol and all other predictive policing programs used by the LAPD, we created a short 1-sheet zine that covers the basics of PredPol. Feel free to share widely – a download link can be found at the bottom of this page.

Download PDF of ‘A Guide to PredPol and Dismantling it’ Zine

Download Printable ‘A Guide to PredPol and Dismantling it’ Zine

Sophie Wang (aka shuf) is a big nerd and small zine gremlin who challenges our taken-for-granted assumptions about western science through comics and zines. She draws (heh) from her background in Science and Technology Studies and her many years making art of widely varying quality. You can follow her at @wangshuf.

Adit Dhanushkodi is a design researcher and critical technologist whose practice blends together design research methods with critical technology investigations as a way to explore questions about machine learning algorithms, predictive policing, and surveillance.

Leah Horgan is a phd candidate, graphic artist, & community organizer based in Long Beach researching data-driven governance, smart cities, data visualization, and surveillance.