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 centralize disparate data feeds for investigations; public commenters said the same capabilities expand possibilities for surveillance and immigration enforcement.

Commander Randy Goddard, who oversees the LAPD Information Technology Bureau, told the committee "Right now, there's 3 centers that we have on our map to finish first, and that's gonna be Topanga, West Los Angeles, and Central." He said the current rollout is funded primarily by a state organized-retail-theft grant and that additional hardware purchases would use roughly $9,000,000 remaining in grant funds. Goddard said the department is preparing an RFP for the software foundation, expects the RFP to be issued for 30 days, to pilot returned solutions for 60 to 90 days, and is "hoping to have something out by the end of this year." He described deployment as a "crawl, walk, run" process and said initial staffing goals are to cover peak hours with one to two people per center as budget permits.

Committee members asked what cameras and other data sources would be tied into RTCCs. Goddard said the city lacks a robust public camera network and that the department will rely in part on privately owned cameras voluntarily shared by businesses and institutions; he also said the system would integrate existing ALPR (automatic license-plate reader) feeds. On the question of federal access, Goddard explained that criminal-justice data handled by law enforcement vendors must meet CJIS (Criminal Justice Information Services) security standards and that the department's current approach is to keep law-enforcement data under those controls.

Public commenters and activists repeatedly raised separate concerns: contracting with consulting firms associated with past LAPD programs, vendor selection (names cited by commenters included Peregrine, Palantir and other commercial providers), potential linkage to fusion centers and federal partners, the planned expansion to 21 patrol divisions, and the use of ALPRs, drones and aggregated private-camera feeds. Several speakers urged the committee to reject or pause the expansion; others, including some council members, emphasized potential crime-prevention benefits and pointed to RTCC results reported in other U.S. cities.

What the committee did: After the presentation and questions, Councilmember Lee moved to note and file the Board of Police Commissioners report; Councilmember Price seconded. The committee vote was recorded as five ayes (Councilmember Lee; Councilmember Price; Councilmember McOsker; Councilmember Soto Martinez; Councilmember Park). The motion to note and file the report passed.

Next steps: LAPD said the department will survey council offices and communities, analyze a ZenCity public survey the department received (Goddard said roughly 5,000 respondents), finalize and release the RFP, pilot vendor solutions, and seek council and council-district support for future centers. Goddard acknowledged staffing and budget constraints and said the department will return with further information on vendor selection, community outreach and integration plans.

Final note: The record of the committee includes extensive public comment opposed to the expansion and several requests from council members for more detail on community outreach, vendor selection and data-sharing safeguards.