Before the Bullet Hits the Body: Dismantling Predictive Policing in Los Angeles

Predictive policing refers to a range of policing practices that claim to use pre-existing demographic, environmental, and historic crime data to predict future patterns of crime as well as projecting “where crime will occur,” and “who” will commit crime. This method of policing has drastically increased in use throughout the years, but the move toward pre-emptive policing is criminalizing people and communities for behavior that law enforcement claim are precursors to a criminal or terrorist activity. This report outlines the predictive policing technology used by the Los Angeles Police Department, and discusses its faults, including its reliance on racialized historical crime data, and its contribution to the militarization of policing.