SurveillanceLAPD wants to know why you are taking these photos

If you live in Los Angeles and decide to take some pictures of a few monuments or public places to send to friends and family or for your own private collection, the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) may see you as a potential threat to public safety.

That is the message the LAPD is reinforcing to its officers and the general public through its Suspicious Activity Reporting (SAR) program. The Huffington Post reports that the program, Launched in 2008, aims to identify a number of “suspicious activities” which officers should report to the department’s counterterrorism division. Depending on the context and the situation, the LAPD may consider taking video, making notes, and drawing diagrams as “suspicious activities.” .

SAR reports are reviewed not only by the LAPD counterterrorism squad, but they are also sent to the Joint Regional Intelligence Center in Norwalk. The reports can be uploaded to a national database accessible by law enforcement agencies across the country.

A recent study from George Washington University, co-authored by the LAPDs deputy chief Michael Downing, the head of Counter-Terrorism and Special Operations Bureau, found that suspicious activity reporting has “flooded fusion-centers, law enforcement, and other security entities with white-noise. The profusion of SAR reports “complicates the intelligence process and distorts resource allocation and deployment decisions.”

The Post notes that in addition to flooding databases with profiles of people taking pictures and notes, not knowing their intent, it also subjects people who are doing nothing wrong to police encounters and questioning. The information that is shared through these databases and fusion-centers can make it hard for those traveling, trying to get government jobs, or security clearances.

While this could potentially protect against a terrorist attack, it also impinges on the rights of citizens, especially people that do not have arrest records or who are taking pictures or video for personal reasons. The harassment of photographers has been documented in this video on the American Civil Liberties Union’s (ACLU) Web site

The ACLU of Southern California has repeatedly advocated for SARs to have safeguards that would make them focus only on criminal activity. Tourists or people who want to take photographs of their communities should not be harassed and have personal information in databases when they have done nothing wrong and police have no reason to suspect criminal activity.

The SAR’s standard to interrogate a potential suspect is very loose; it only requires that officers be able to articulate a reason to suspect criminal activity, and that standard is all police need to need to detain an individual temporarily or pat someone down.

When it came to proposing changes to the system at an LAPD commission meeting earlier this month, the LAPD refused to include that guarantee and the civilian Police Commission did not press the issue. The battle is not quite over yet; the LAPD’s Inspector General is currently auditing the SAR program, and is planning on issuing a report back to the Police Commission within the next couple of months.

The report could shed light on the success of the program and whether it would hurt the department’s efforts to require reasonable suspicion before people snapping photographs on the streets of Lo Angeles are stopped and asked to explain why they do what they do.