An eye on historical inequities in Pasadena
By: Sabrina Farooq
From the sky at night, a thief appears as a white light; a bright silhouette darting in and out a dark, undefined form of the buildings and streets. The police helicopters circling above, equipped with thermal optics, aren’t detecting light. They detect areas of heat, like that of a fleeing body.
“It shows up as a white figurine and they’re hot because of the body heat,” said Monica Cuellar, spokesperson for the Pasadena Police Department (PPD). “You can see the person running or hiding. It’s not one hundred percent perfect because trees might be covering it or they might get under something.”
Cuellar said this technology has been around for “eons.” What’s new for the PPD is an arsenal enhanced by artificial intelligence (AI). This includes several products manufactured by policing industry big-fish Axon (formerly Taser), like a smart holster that automatically activates the body worn camera to record upon a drawn gun. It even live streams body cam footage for dispatcher assistance.
Utilizing AI in law enforcement is referred to as algorithmic or data-driven policing. Marketed as police accountability measures, the PPD’s Axon products are almost benign. However the department’s AI-powered gunshot detectors and automated license plate readers are concentrated in historically underserved communities of Northwest Pasadena, presenting a risk in adding AI into the mix.
“Whether it’s the usage of AI, algorithms, or anything else, they’re not really changes to the police, it’s just a pattern,” said Matyos Kidane of the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition. “These were supposed to solve policing. They used algorithms. They were fed data. But all they did really was kind of facilitate and catalyze the same kind of racist policing that we’ve seen in the past.”
In the formerly redlined northwest area, 2022 Census data shows it is not only of the lowest household income but also, the residents predominantly identify as Hispanic, with small clusters of Black neighborhoods. Historically wealthy and white areas remain so today.
The average household income in all of Pasadena is $97,818, according to the 2022 Census. But the economic divide is wide. The average household income of Pasadena’s top 5% was $547,864, which is 45 times more than the poorest 20% of households’ average of $12,153, according to a 2013-’17 study by Occidental College professor Peter Dreier and Glendale Community College professor Mark Maier.
Pasadena has begun inclusionary housing efforts with state and federal grants attempting to tackle the housing crisis across the nation, however, the housing plan said the city doesn’t meet the threshold of “disadvantaged communities” and maintains zoning laws that make affordable housing scarce.
“Everybody wants technology in the sense of what’s the next best thing,” said Florence Annang, a police oversight commissioner for Pasadena and member of the city’s NAACP chapter. “And in the police’s minds is, how far can we go? How far will the community allow us to invade their privacy?”
Along with Pasadena’s city hall, police department, and several libraries, four public parks are equipped with security cameras. All are in Northwest Pasadena, including Villa Parke, Jackie Robinson Community Center, Robinson Park, and Pintoresca Park. The first two offer free health and addiction services for the community at large and support for system-impacted, unhoused, and undocumented residents.
These security cameras were funded by the US Department of Housing and Urban Development Community Development Block Grant, which was intended to provide “decent housing and a suitable living environment, and by expanding economic opportunities,” according to the agency’s website.
Plans are also set to increase lighting and add surveillance cameras to Washington Park following two fatal shootings there. Washington Park is located in the same Northwest area where the only bank in the city that would lend to Black Pasadenans once stood, after the construction of the 210 freeway had displaced many from their once thriving neighborhood.
The footage would not be monitored in real time once they’re fully set up, Cuellar said. She said she thinks a real-time system would be useful at the fenced off Colorado Street Bridge, otherwise known as “suicide bridge.”
Pasadena was the first city in LA County to implement the gunshot detector ShotSpotter. In only a minute within an 82-foot radius, AI sensors confirm abrasive sounds were indeed shots fired, locate the source, and notify the police to increase response times. ShotSpotter does not detect small caliber weapons; however, it has mistaken fireworks or cars backfiring to be bullets.
KnockLA had found most sensors were installed in Northwest Pasadena; information that had previously been withheld from the public. Cuellar said that ShotSpotter representatives had chosen where to install based on data provided by the PPD, and that its locations had even been withheld from the department itself. Annang said that ShotSpotter “was told what was needed and where it was needed.”
“The Northwest area has always been considered–which it’s not really–the poorer neighborhood,” Cuellar said. “And a lot of the complaints were that we weren’t responding to a lot of calls there fast enough when things were happening. So now with ShotSpotter, even though people say, oh, now you’re just doing it because you want to listen to us. Well no, it’s actually increased our time response.”
No gun casings were found in 75% of the alerts the PPD responded to in 2022. The sensors alerted authorities to one homicide and five victims of the 49 shootings investigated that year.
Cuellar said that response times from “2016 as opposed to 2020, 2021” could show the department’s improvement but she did not specify exactly which years or provide documentation showing response times.
“People were against it because it’s believed it picks up vocal sounds, like people talking and so forth. That is not really true,” Cuellar said. “It’s more about saving a life than really catching the bad person. Because getting to that person who may be on the ground bleeding out is more important than trying to catch the person who did it.”
In New York, a private street conversation recorded by ShotSpotter was used to connect events crucial to solving a murder case, South Coast Today reported in 2012. The Policing Project of NYU Law School found in 2019 that the risk of ShotSpotter capturing individuals’ voices was “extremely low.” One of its key takeaways was for the company not to share exact sensor locations.
Annang said that police are “never going to admit” that ShotSpotter can pick up voices and that because they “don’t have the trust of the community,” responding to ShotSpotter alerts will not lead to any convictions or leads.
“At the end of the day, it’s gang territory, and so the emotions and everything that comes with that culture is historically in these areas,” Annang said. “This is internal stuff that’s going on. Does that make it right? Absolutely not. But the equity of how you put surveillance, is it right? I’m not sure about that. Because when you talk about catalytic converters, when you talk about people stealing from the city or the copper wires and all that, maybe if you had some cameras over there, you might’ve been catching these people a lot quicker. But you spent all your money in [districts] 1, 3, and 5.”
Also concentrated in districts 1, 3, and 5, which mostly make up Northwest Pasadena, are the city’s license plate readers. LPRs are intended to be placed in high-traffic areas, Annang said, such as near freeways. However in District 7, for instance, there are no LPRs despite being right by the 710 freeway. District 7 is a wealthy area located farther south along the border of South Pasadena, which was once a sundown town (where Black folk and other minorities were barred after dusk).
Automated license plate recognition (ALPR) uses artificial intelligence to identify cars by not only their license plates, but by decals, make and model, and car damages. Many neighborhood associations and private businesses also use ALPRs and may share data with the police at their own discretion.
There are also ALPRs on some of the PPD’s cruisers, which can identify and cross-reference license plates en route. ALPR data is not surveyed for traffic violations or unpaid traffic tickets, according to Cuellar. She said ALPRs have been handy for cases like stalkers, missing persons, and stolen cars.
“There’s a narrative the police give which is a good, justifiable narrative,” Annang said. “Which is, yes, we can track stalkers or we can track stolen cars. But it’s also, we can see who’s moving around an area. That’s a narrative you’re not going to hear.”
With documents obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) in 2020, the PPD was found to have been careless with ALPR data, “inadvertently” sharing it to a collective law enforcement database ICE had access to. The department then pledged to “review” where they contributed data.
Though Pasadena is not formally a “sanctuary city,” a 2017 policy established the city’s commitment to the “confidentiality of information gathered for municipal purposes” and limits the “dissemination of information regarding a person’s religion, sexual orientation, national and ethnic origin and immigration status.”
ALPRs can pose a threat to civil rights and liberties, especially in jurisdictions with limited public transportation, the Brennan Center for Justice said in 2020. They’ve been used to monitor protests or by private businesses to assess loan applications, among other uses.
License plate data, along with information gathered from social media, was used to build profiles of residents by the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) as part of their predictive policing program Operation Laser. It was shuttered in 2019, criticized for targeting Black and Brown communities.
In Pasadena, arrestees are 45% Hispanic despite being 36% of the local population. Twenty-seven percent of arrestees are Black, despite being 8% of the city, according to a 2024 analysis from Occidental College.
“In Pasadena, I think it’s pretty much the same as it is in everywhere, like, when you get two groups of people, you know, they’re bound to get into it, especially when people come out of county jail and they come out with racial tensions, you know, sometimes that carries out on the streets,” local rapper L-Boy told StreetGangs.com in a 2013 interview. “You got some people out there bangin’ and shit. But you know, you got people out here tryna feed their families, tryna get paid and shit. People get locked up. Cops locked everybody up. So the ones that are out right here is tryna make paper.”
