Check LBPD
About CheckLBPD (Follow us on Twitter and Instagram @CheckLBPD for updates)
Democracy survives through a system of checks and balances. In Long Beach, those checks are lacking when it comes to police accountability.
Neither the City Attorney, the City Prosecutor, the City Council, nor the L.A. District Attorney seems interested in actions that would put them in conflict with the well-funded and politically-adept Long Beach Police Officers Association.
Even the Citizen Police Complaint Commission is rendered virtually powerless by the City Manager's veto power.
Consequently, LBPD's misconduct and mismanagement has gone unchecked.
CheckLBPD seeks to provide a check on the power of the LBPD and provide community groups and activists with data and data-driven policy suggestions as they push for police reform.
CheckLBPD will strive to check on the secret expansion of Police Surveillance in Long Beach—something many other jurisdictions do through Surveillance Transparency Ordinances.
Our site will also host research, public documents, and data visualizations that may be useful to local journalists. All writings and data visualizations are published under a Creative Commons Attribution license; feel free to repurpose them with proper attribution.
CheckLBPD is also where you can search LBPD vendor records and the LBPD’s TigerText metadata—through data dashboards designed to make the data accessible. An in-progress report will provide a much-needed response to the city’s “independent” TigerText review.
Research Tools
These are resources to monitor LBPD surveillance and LBPD vendor spending.
Tigertext Metadata
Interactive Data Dashboard with in-depth Investigation of three scandals
LBPD Vendor Data
Resources
Helping links to general and LB research resources
CheckLBPD Investigations:
Using the California Public Records Act, CheckLBPD obtained a list of the city and zip code of all LBPD officers. The records show only 18.5% of LBPD officers live in the Long Beach city limits-with officers that do live in Long Beach heavily favoring East Long Beach over the West Side. LBPD officers live in…
During last summer’s protests, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) had drones and AS350 helicopters in the air over 15 cities across the country collecting hundreds of hours of footage of Black Lives Matters protests. The data was fed into what DHS calls the “big pipe”-a database used by the Federal agencies and local police…
The LBPD has conducted over 4,000 facial recognition searches in the last decade, using both government and private databases.
The Long Beach Police Department has used facial recognition technology since 2010-with the department having access to three different investigative facial recognition databases. The database used the longest and most is the government-run Los Angeles County Regional Identification System (LACRIS). The other two systems, Vigilant Solutions’ FaceSearch and Clearview AI, were provided by the companies…
Other than the Long Beach Police Department, the Georgia Department of Corrections was the only law enforcement-type agency to ever use TigerText. Prison employees in Georgia used it briefly in 2013, before the department’s lawyers determined its use violated the state’s record laws and could lead to violations of discovery rules in criminal or civil…
Senate Bill 272 requires public agencies to disclose all enterprise systems in use, with some limited exceptions. The bill defines an enterprise system as “a software application or computer system that collects, stores, exchanges, and analyzes information that the agency uses that is both of the following: (A) A multi-departmental system or a system that…
The public’s first indication that the Small Business Administration’s Paycheck Protection Program forgivable loans were not being distributed as intended was when large, publicly-traded companies, such as JP Morgan Chase, Ruth’s Chris Steak House, and Shake Shack were able to obtain loans as large as $20 million-while true small businesses were unable to get funds…
Since the murder of George Floyd, there has been a flurry of activity at the Long Beach Citizen Police Complaint Commission in response to calls for reform. In July, the CPCC finally filed five years of missing annual reports-reports the CPCC’s by-laws require to be completed every year. The CPCC held a special meeting to…
In the past, when former Citizen Police Complaint Commission (CPCC) members wanted to speak publicly about the commission’s problems, they were reportedly told by the City Attorney that they could be charged with Brown Act violations for doing so-a threat they took seriously. But the body’s last regular meeting on June 11 went past midnight, as the commissioners…
Freedom Surveillance may sound like someone’s attempt to coin a new oxymoron-like jumbo shrimp or civil war-but it is actually the name of the Arizona-based company that manufactured the high-tech, truck-mounted camera the Long Beach Police Department deployed at a morning Peace Walk organized by Black Lives Matter Long Beach (BLM LBC) on July 3.…
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