Posts by Greg Buhl
A Majority of LBPD Sworn Officers Live Outside Long Beach. Only 18.5% Reside in the City, One Lives in Texas. *With Maps, Lots of Maps.
Share this…FacebookTwitterRedditEmail 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…
Read More
City Council Drone Insurance Agenda Item Letter
June 13, 2021 Long Beach City Council City of Long Beach 411 West Ocean Boulevard, 1st Floor Long Beach, CA 90802 via email: cityclerk@longbeach.gov RE: Agenda item 31 – Drone Liability Insurance Dear Councilmembers, Agenda item 31 (21-0558) contains a renewal of a $7,185 worth drone liability insurance policy among the $3.3…
Read More
The LBPD’s Drone Program: Four Drones, Zero Departmental Policy, and Yet Another Reason for the Passage of a Surveillance Equipment Transparency Ordinance
Share this…FacebookTwitterRedditEmail 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…
Read More
Framework on Reconciliation December 9, 2020 Meeting
Share this…FacebookTwitterRedditEmail The Framework on Reconciliation has its next meeting on December 9th. Sign up for the meeting here. Questions can be submitted to the Framework planners here: adam.lara@longbeach.gov The Framework has announced an almost overwhelming number of specific policy goals. One of those announced goals is to “explore the practice of facial recognition technology…
Read More
The Surveillance Architecture of Long Beach: A Decade of LBPD Facial Recognition Technology Use with Inadequate Policy, Oversight, and Transparency (Abridged Version)
The LBPD has conducted over 4,000 facial recognition searches in the last decade, using both government and private databases.
Read More
The Surveillance Architecture of Long Beach: A Decade of LBPD Facial Recognition Technology Use with Inadequate Policy, Oversight, and Transparency (Full Report)
Share this…FacebookTwitterRedditEmail This is a longer version of a report we have also published as an abridged article. That version is about 1/3 the length. As this is a complex topic that has not been explored in Long Beach this report quite detailed and about a 45-minute read. Those with a personal or professional interest…
Read More
Preview: CheckLBPD’s In-Progress TigerText Independent Investigation
Share this…FacebookTwitterRedditEmail 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…
Read More
LBPD Enterprise Systems Missing from City’s Senate Bill 272 Required List
Share this…FacebookTwitterRedditEmail 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…
Read More
The Surveillance Architecture of Long Beach: LBPD Vendors and the Paycheck Protection Program
Share this…FacebookTwitterRedditEmail 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…
Read More
Recent Citizen Police Complaint Commission Reform Efforts
Share this…FacebookTwitterRedditEmail 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…
Read More
Citizen Police Complaint Commission Powerlessness and Secrecy Illuminated by the Death of George Floyd
Share this…FacebookTwitterRedditEmail 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…
Read More
The Surveillance Architecture of Long Beach: Advanced Cameras
Share this…FacebookTwitterRedditEmail 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…
Read More
LBPD Challenge Coins and Other Cursed Artifacts
Share this…FacebookTwitterRedditEmail Before CheckLBPD was CheckLBPD, we worked with Stephen Downing of the Beachcomber on his reporting on the LBPD “2020 Riot” memorabilia. We were able to help him track down two officers selling unapproved challenge coins and finding links between the LBPOA and Sunshine Sports, one of the manufacturers of some of the unapproved…
Read More