How ICE Is Gaining a Scary Amount of Data Through Police Data-Mining

A report released Thursday details the massive, complex police databases that local law enforcement in LA and Massachusetts use to investigate suspects. Through a service known as COPLINK, the storehouses of data that local police use during investigations are being shared with a division of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Homeland Security Investigations. While ICE representatives in the report note the usefulness of the software, several privacy, immigration, and civil liberties advocates question both the accuracy of the software and the use of data to surveil people. COPLINK combines information from multiple police databases, and then allows law enforcement to sort and filter through them in the course of their investigations. Injustice Today reviewed documents from the Massachusetts and LA versions of the program.