On Wednesday, Nov. 15, the Claremont Colleges Intercollegiate Department of Asian American Studies (IDAAS) held a teach-in hosted by the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition.
The event, titled “From Los Angeles to Gaza: Charting the Global Struggle Against Racialized Surveillance,” featured guest speakers Matyos Kidane, Shakeer Rahman and Hamid Khan. It centered around racist policing techniques and the role of higher education institutions in racist surveillance in the United States.
Located in the Skid Row area of LA, the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition was founded in 2011. The organization, based out of the Los Angeles Community Action Network, works to build community power to abolish police surveillance.
Scripps College professor Jih-Fei Cheng, a core faculty member of IDAAS, said IDAAS brought the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition to campus to discuss the local struggle to oppose surveillance and abolish policing.
“Campuses have been the site of radical student activism and thus a critical target of law enforcement intervention,” Cheng told TSL via email. “Throughout the late 1950s and early 1970s, radical social movements like the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and the Black Panther Party were monitored and infiltrated by the FBI’s COINTELPRO, leading to assassinations and imprisonment. At the same time, U.S. higher education has been a source for producing knowledge and technologies used by law enforcement, including the LAPD, and for global militarization.”
At the talk, the speakers highlighted tropes they said the police use to perpetuate harm against communities that are most vulnerable to police violence.
“The criminal Black, the illegal Latino, the manipulative Asian, the terrorist Muslim, the deviant trans, all these cultural constructs are very much what we see right now,” Khan said. “These are tropes that are still employed to this day within the predominantly Black, largely unhoused, Skid Row communities.”
The speakers then discussed how surveillance technologies and methods are tested in vulnerable communities like Skid Row.
“Skid Row is the place with the most concentrated form of policing, but also a place of extreme kind of experimentation by police,” Rahman said. “It’s where police have always deployed the latest technologies, like automated license plate readers, body cameras and predictive policing techniques, testing them on the community before deploying them elsewhere. It’s a laboratory for policing.”
These testing policies have influenced resistance to policing for decades. Rahman described Skid Row as a site “leading the abolitionist resistance to policing in Los Angeles” and as the reason why the Coalition chose to base itself out of Skid Row.
The speakers elaborated on specific surveillance programs and initiatives that disproportionately targeted Black and brown communities.
One of the programs cited was Suspicious Activity Reporting (SAR), developed by the Department of Homeland Security in close collaboration with local police forces. SAR was launched in the 2010-2011 period as a reform to the era of national security policing that followed 9/11.
“The idea was that [SAR] was going to make national security policing less discriminatory and more fair because of the guidelines,” Khan said. “But when you try to create the sort of objective, generic standard for policing and put those resources in the hands of police, they’re going to use that to target the same populations they’ve always targeted … Black communities, migrant communities, queer and trans people, and sex workers.”
Another initiative the speakers discussed was the iWATCH “If You See Something, Say Something” campaign, which encouraged people to report on fellow community members.
“The LAPD did eventually audit this program in 2014 and found that 81 percent of the reports were initiated by community informants,” Khan said. “It disproportionately targeted Black people as a majority of the reports came from rich, white neighborhoods reporting people of color.”
Furthermore, the speakers addressed the ties between campus police and local law enforcement, as well as the surveillance infrastructure present on university campuses across the United States.
This surveillance infrastructure includes cameras, tracking social media activity and facial recognition systems for building entry. The purpose of this infrastructure is to monitor the activities of students, Kidane, Rahman and Khan said.
But the speakers suggested that campus police often have special agreements with local prosecutors and police departments, which use evidence from these technologies to criminalize certain communities on campus.
Professor Cheng agreed with the speakers, telling TSL, “The Stop LAPD Spying Coalition reminded us that campus security agencies oftentimes have a direct line to local law enforcement and even facilitate the surveillance of students involved in activism through social media and other means, as has been the case with students engaged in Black Lives Matter.”
Audience member Bastion Collins PZ ’27 said the teach-in was a powerful introduction to the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition’s work.
“I think that how [the Coalition] has their own unique place in the abolition of police and reformative justice, how they’re holding back police states and empowering the most marginalized members of a community and analyzing what the police are doing, and where their actions stem from — I think all of this is fascinating,” Collins said.
Professor Cheng also mentioned how the talk highlighted the role of student organizations in restorative justice and abolitionist work.
“The Stop LAPD Spying Coalition urges student organizations and campuses to disentangle what they call the science-military-prison-industrial complex,” Cheng said. “They argue that we must end policing on campuses, including campus security, to protect student activism and preserve communities of learning.”
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