
Panopticops: How aerial surveillance has changed policing and crime in Los Angeles - wallflower
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/27/magazine/panopticops.html
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georgecmu
A very positive article about the de facto symbol of racial segregation and
police profiling in LA.

For a somewhat different perspective you may refer to:

[https://vanwinkles.com/los-angeles-police-department-
helicop...](https://vanwinkles.com/los-angeles-police-department-helicopters-
are-loud-lousy-crime-deterrents) _Unaffectionately referred to as the “ghetto
bird,” the endlessly circling police chopper is as powerful a symbol of “Los
Angeles” as the Hollywood sign — though it represents a much darker side of
the city. As its unflattering pet name suggests, the choppers don’t usually
hover above million-dollar homes in Malibu. They patrol-lower income
neighborhoods spread out across the city._

[http://www.zocalopublicsquare.org/2014/08/12/growing-up-
in-t...](http://www.zocalopublicsquare.org/2014/08/12/growing-up-in-the-
jungle-i-wanted-to-head-for-the-hills/chronicles/who-we-were/) _nothing—not
Deney Terio, not Philip Bailey—competed with the ghetto birds. Helicopters,
lots of them, often pulled my gaze away from those houses. Cops in the sky.
Almost always at night, the police helicopters roared by with bright lights
that ripped through bedroom curtains and past the squeezed-shut eyelids of
men, women, and children. And they’d come so low, I imagined feeling the chop
of the blades against my numb cheeks. My stomach vibrated with the rumbling,
and my heart skipped and I forgot to breathe as sirens wailed so loud and so
close and swirling blue and red lights reflected off my bedroom’s yellow and
green floral wallpaper and I prayed for it to be over._

Ice Cube - Ghetto Bird
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zhsfn9IyiLQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zhsfn9IyiLQ)
_Why, oh why must you swoop through the hood like everybody from the hood is
up to no good. You think all the girls around here are trickin up there lookin
like Superchicken At night I see your light through my bedroom window But I
ain 't got shit but the pad and pencil I can't wait till I hear you say "I'm
going down, mayday, mayday."_

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pessimizer
Wow, ghetto bird PR. "Predictive policing" using the data about where you
usually arrest people to figure out where you should idle until you find
somebody to arrest is functionally equivalent to what they always did.

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coldcode
Someday soon the helicopter will be grounded and replaced by cheaper drones.
Then the drones will be replaced by autonomous creeping and flying swarms of
autonomous artificial insects. Then the police themselves are replaced by
robot officers. Then people are replaced by robot people. Now crime is
programmed out of the people. Easy.

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hrktb
> programmed

This is the key I think. Robot people will have buffer overflows, memory
corruption and silently ignored errors. You will need some continuous
integration style routine to check for erroneous behaviors. Something that
would do Check Operations to Preserve Specifications, or COPS for short.

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13thLetter
I was curious about the Ramirez aerial surveillance HQ described in the
article and managed to find what looks like the spot on Google Earth:

[https://www.google.com/maps/@34.0469559,-118.2309557,926a,20...](https://www.google.com/maps/@34.0469559,-118.2309557,926a,20y,41.42t/data=!3m1!1e3)

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harywilke
Geoff Manaugh has an amazing blog about architecture, space, the city and just
about everything in between. his write up on his NYT piece.
[http://www.bldgblog.com/2016/03/panopticops/](http://www.bldgblog.com/2016/03/panopticops/)

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arcticfox
I pretty much always assumed this is what police helicopters did.

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searine
>panopticon

Is anyone else tired of this buzz word?

It's like, damn, I get it, you skimmed Foucault's wikipedia article, no need
to bring it up every week.

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bottled_poe
From Wikipedia: "Jeremy Bentham proposed the panopticon as a circular building
with an observation tower in the centre of an open space surrounded by an
outer wall."

The analogy seems very relevant.

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CamperBob2
Note that "panopticon" doesn't apply if you can't look back.

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Jtsummers
?

A panopticon allows the inmates to be viewed but not know if they are being
viewed at any given time.

