An internal audit of the Los Angeles Police Department’s Chronic Offender Program and PredPol usage found few accurate ways to measure accountability in data-driven policing.

In the midst of the Cold War, the Central Intelligence Agency routinely collected information about the methods of control employed by the Soviet Union to capture, incarcerate, and punish those opposed to the state. While the CIA used this information to denounce the USSR in reports such as this one available in the CREST archives, a modern reader will note how several of the criticized policies resemble those of the criminal justice system in modern day America.

Giving federal authority to local police departments is a dicey endeavor to begin with, but when even the top lawyer in the state decides the rules governing the scope of that authority are irrelevant, the situation is made even more dangerous for immigrants, or for anyone who might be racially profiled as immigrants.