WHAP! Lecture Series

The City of West Hollywood and CalArts present the West Hollywood Aesthetics and Politics Series “Black Out,” on the Surveillance of Blackness. 

The Stop LAPD Spying Coalition, ‘Abolishing the Stalker State’

The Stop LAPD Spying Coalition will be speaking on, “Abolishing the Stalker State.” With them as a respondent will be Jose Rosales from Fordham University.

Friday, November 20, 2020 | 4:30 PM – 6:00 PM PST 

Watch on YouTube: tiny.cc/2020whap

The Stop LAPD Spying Coalition is a Skid Row-based community alliance. It was created in response to the Los Angeles Police Department’s Special Order 11, which authorizes LAPD officers to gather intelligence on non-criminal behavior. The coalition has since launched campaigns against LAPD’s various surveillance programs including mathwashing crime data, digital tools that aid gentrification, the use of drones, its war on youth, and faux-oversight bureaucracy. The coalition recently helped defeat LASER Zones, which deemed black and brown areas and communities criminal because of patterns in data, and its Predictive Policing program (PredPol), which further targeted communities before crimes even occurred. They are part of the recent wave of abolitionist groups that reject all forms of police oppression and any policy that marks whole communities as suspect in the eyes of the State.

Jose Rosales is a researcher based in Queens, NY.