Do Algorithms Have a Place in Policing?
Inside the bright-white walls of his office, in one of Los Angeles’s poorest neighborhoods, Hamid Khan is a calming presence. Khan, 62 years old, is the founding organizer of the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition, a police watchdog group headquartered in Skid Row. A tall, broad-chested man, with a pronounced forehead and grayish-black hair kept neatly trimmed, he is patient with the constant parade of people from the neighborhood who walk in asking for toiletries or seeking advice about dealing with prying officers. One afternoon, as we finished a meal at a Mexican restaurant, he got the leftover guacamole to go, and asked for more chips. “Sean will love this,” he said, then carried the paper sack to a homeless man whose tent was propped against a fence outside the coalition’s office.
At least once a week, though, Khan gives an almost theatrical performance of his role as one of the Los Angeles Police Department’s most vocal critics. At public meetings, he hurls startling obscenities: He has referred to the LAPD as “this motherfucking department” and called one official “Mr. Frankenstein himself.” During public comments, he’ll turn his back to police commissioners, occasionally urging supporters in the audience to drown them out with raucous chants. Khan’s methods are more radical than those of many other local activist groups, and yet, Stop LAPD Spying has arguably been more successful than any of them in challenging the powerful LAPD to end controversial practices.
Khan likes to say that he’s just the coalition’s coordinator, but in reality he’s the founder and de facto CEO. His organization has brought in a relatively small amount in donations and other outside funding, relying mostly on indefatigable volunteers. For years, Khan ran the coalition without pay while living on his pension as a retired UPS pilot. Now it pays him a small monthly stipend. Khan’s 32-year-old daughter, Nadia, volunteers as the head of the coalition’s youth-justice efforts.
Under Khan’s leadership, the coalition’s members have taught themselves how to file open-records requests to obtain information; organized dramatic, well-attended protests; and gained national respect. They have done all this while maintaining a core belief that has at times alienated even Khan’s closest allies: Law enforcement should be abolished altogether.
Shahid Buttar, the director of grassroots advocacy for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit focused on digital civil liberties, got to know Khan when they worked together to battle the expansion of police surveillance technologies. Because EFF aims to reform police use of technology, not abolish it, Khan won’t collaborate with the organization much. Still, Buttar told me he has an immense amount of respect for Khan, a man he said is “like the uncle I never had” and “a stalwart example of the resistance.” He said, “He gives no F’s and is always willing to speak very directly.”
Steve Soboroff, the president of the Los Angeles Board of Police Commissioners, which oversees the police department, is often on the receiving end of Khan’s sharp language. He told me, “I think it’s to our credit that we give them credit, because it’s hard to listen to somebody who talks to us the way they talk to us.”
Khan already had a reputation for being well versed in police surveillance technology in October 2015, when he was invited to the Data & Civil Rights conference in Washington, D.C., to participate in a roundtable on “predictive policing”—the use of analytics and statistics to forecast crime—which was growing in popularity. While researching the LAPD’s use of various technologies, Khan had become particularly alarmed by a program called PredPol that had been pioneered inside the LAPD in the late 2000s, and had since spread to departments in Seattle, Atlanta, and elsewhere.
