MediaJustice

Internal documents show a Polish firm, Edge NPD, with no law enforcement experience helped LAPD collect tens of thousands of tweets related to Black Lives Matter and racial justice protests. The records suggest that LAPD was interested in using the company’s services in part to help the department respond to “negative narratives”. During the 40-day trial in October and November of 2020, Edge NPD provided LAPD with a dashboard monitoring tweets related to six topics: “civil unrest”, “American policing”, “domestic extremism and white nationalism”, “election security”, “potential danger” and the conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan (which at the time was prompting local LA protests.) Read the full story featuring MediaJustice’s Executive Director, Steven Renderos.

“It creates a much larger haystack of data that doesn’t actually lead to any real, tangible, positive outcome for communities. Instead it just equips the police department with more data that helps it kind of justify its own efforts to to tell a better story about itself. I don’t trust the Los Angeles police department to use a tool with this amount of data in a way that’s responsible, because history has shown us that they can’t.”

Steven Renderos via The Guardian

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