Public Safety Committee notes LAPD report on real-time crime centers after hours of public concern

The Los Angeles Public Safety Committee on Wednesday noted and filed a Board of Police Commissioners report on the Los Angeles Police Department's planned expansion of real-time crime centers, a move that prompted extended public comment criticizing the technology as an expansion of surveillance and cross-agency data sharing.

Public commenters called RTCCs a surveillance dragnet that would disproportionately affect Black, Latino and low-income neighborhoods and said the systems facilitate data sharing with federal agencies including ICE, CBP and the FBI. "Real time crime centers are tools of war used to criminalize, cage, and disappear our communities," said a public commenter who identified herself as Grace. Another commenter, quoting the planned technical components, said the centers would centralize automatic license-plate reader data, video and other sources and deliver that data to federal partners.

Why it matters: Committee members heard competing accounts of the RTCCs' likely effects. LAPD staff described RTCCs as a tool to reduce response times, increase clearance rates and…