A year after the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) ended a surveillance program it used for years to predict where crimes might be committed before they happened, the department is using a similar program. Critics say it’s turning out to be yet another gift-wrapped pile of feces stinking up communities of color. Police Chief Michel Moore cited financial constraints the coronavirus pandemic prompted when he announced the department's decision to end its predictive policing program, Pred-Pol, last April. He has said a year before the decision to cut Pred-Pol that he disagrees with critics who said the program enables racial profiling. “The manner of how we use data is informed by the evolution of technology,” Moore told the Los Angeles Times in October 2019. “We’re going to smartly use our precious resources.” The next year, he was announcing the «hard decision» to rethink the strategy, costing hundreds of thousands of dollars. Problem is Moore, a white man, has his eye on the wrong problem. “Rather than re-evaluating their whole business model, they’re just trying to reframe the value of the product,” Albert Fox Cahn, the founder of the anti-surveillance advocacy group Surveillance Technology Oversight Project, told The Guardian. “They’re saying: here’s how you can prevent crime by allocating officers and changing patrols and changing who you engage with. And that’s going to result in the exact same outcomes.” Read more