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These groups have done important work that has led to real change in their communities. The work of the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition has a particular relevance to Long Beach—as our departments have a close relationship in both investigations and security grant funding. CheckLBPD suspects much of what  the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition has uncovered in L.A. has also been taking place in Long Beach.

The Stop LAPD Spying Coalition played an essential role in uncovering and ending LAPD flawed LASER predictive policing program. The Los Angeles Strategic Extraction and Restoration (LASER) program targeted people using a point system based on criminal history, supposed gang ties, and the last time an individual interacted with the police.

Once you were on the list, it was nearly impossible to get off it, a situation described as a racist feed-back loop. The situation was compounded by LAPD falsification of entries in the CalGangs database—an abuse that has led to criminal charges against six LAPD officers and the end of the LAPD participation in the program. LBPD is a participating department in the CalGangs database—with the department and City Prosecutors being vocal supporters of the program in the past.

Operation LASER relied on technology from PredPol and Palantir. The Stop LAPD Spying Coalition’s campaign contributed to the LAPD’s decision to stop use of predictive policing software from the company PrepPol in April 2020.

The extent to which any of these issues were replicated in Long Beach is unknown, but there are hints that Long Beach may have its own predictive policing program.

The LBPD definitely used Palantir, the CalGangs database, and it seems likely they used PredPol. The LBPD also employs three private intelligence analysts from SRA International who would be more than capable of implementing any predictive policing program. The LBPD paid $500,000 for Palantir services between 2015 and 2018, as part of a contract that had the LBPD serve as a beta-tester and reference client for the company. CheckLBPD was unable to find any invoices form PredPol, but that does not mean they did not use the program.

The best evidence that Long Beach may have had a PredPol account was uncovered by an anonymous security researcher and reported by technology writer Cory Doctorow. The researcher found PredPol had set-up easy to guess subdomains for many of its clients, including one set up for longbeach.predpol.com.

Doctorow was able to confirm that many of the other police departments listed were actual PredPol customers, but every single Long Beach in the country denied it. CheckLBPD submitted Public Records Act requests on every Long Beach in the country (including our own), but has so far not come up with anything. It is not an investigation we have given up on though.

Long Beach, CA seems like the most likely candidate for many reasons.

The LAPD was the driving force behind PredPol creation, having commissioned the original algorithm from a UCLA professor. A close partner of the LAPD, it would only be natural that the LBPD would have been one of the departments chosen to demo the program—especially when you know at least one Long Beach was demoing the program.

PredPol can’t work without another program to supply the raw data in a specific form, a level of sophistication most departments don’t have. However, as a client of Palantir the LBPD would have had its data in a form ready for predictive analysis.

In our investigation into the LBPD facial recognition technology, CheckLBPD discovered that the LBPD had free trials with two separate private facial recognition companies, Clearview AI and Vigilant Solutions’ FaceSearch. These free trials were poorly-documented, with the only record of Clearview AI’s use being some recent emails exchanged with the company.

Poorly documented free trials of technology are not the easiest thing to track down through Public Records Act requests—but we are trying. Check this space, follow us on social media, or join our mailing list for any updates.