About

Shakeer Rahman is an attorney working within the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition and Los Angeles Community Action Network. 

Shakeer previously worked as Senior Staff Attorney at The Bail Project and as an Impact Litigation Attorney at The Bronx Defenders, where he was a Skadden Fellow. Before that, Shakeer was a law clerk to Justice Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar on the Supreme Court of California and to Judge Beverly Martin on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit.

Shakeer is licensed to practice in California and New York. He received a J.D. from Harvard Law School, where he was a Harvard Law Review editor, and a B.A. in South Asian history from Columbia University. Shakeer is also a part-time lecturer at UCLA School of Law, where he co-teaches a clinic on community lawyering and public records research.

Selected Litigation

• Stop LAPD Spying Coalition v. City of Los Angeles (filed 2024), challenging LAPD practice of segregating and ignoring "High Profile/Noteworthy" public records requests  

• John Does v. City of Los Angeles v. Ben Camacho and Stop LAPD Spying (filed 2024), defending journalist and community group against lawsuit seeking emotional damages for 800+ officers whose images were published on watchthewatchers.net 

• Ratib Ahmadi v. King County, Washington (filed 2024), putative class action challenging prolonged detention of individuals arrested without probable cause determinations  

• Stop LAPD Spying Coalition v. City of Los Angeles (filed 2023), challenging LAPD's secret monitoring of activist groups

• Matthew Gabbert et al. v. Josephine County, Oregon, et al. (filed 2023), putative class action against Oregon counties that used small amounts of tax debt to seize people's homes

• Stop LAPD Spying Coalition v. City of Los Angeles (filed 2023), challenging LAPD erasure of personnel rosters from city websites

• City of Los Angeles v. Ben Camacho and Stop LAPD Spying Coalition (filed 2023), defending against government lawsuit to censor watchthewatchers.net

• Stop LAPD Spying Coalition v. City of Los Angeles (filed 2023), challenging LAPD suppression of basic personnel records

• Stop LAPD Spying Coalition and UCLA Carceral Ecologies Lab v. County of Los Angeles (filed 2023), challenging secrecy around Los Angeles Sheriff's Department helicopter fleet

• Ben Camacho and Sahra Sulaiman v. City of Los Angeles (filed 2022), challenging LAPD's practice of publishing manipulative “briefing” videos about police shootings while suppressing unedited footage

• Ishtiaq Ahmed v. City of New York et al. (filed 2022), challenging NYPD's "community policing" tactic of using false criminal charges to infiltrate and divide a Brooklyn mosque

• Amicus brief: National Pork Producers Council v. Ross (U.S. Supreme Court), arguing on behalf of historians Thomas Aiello and Joshua Specht that California’s Proposition 12 (banning local sale of eggs and meat originating in cruel confinement conditions) is rooted in Founding Era understanding of state authority to regulate local food sales (filed 2022)

• Gina Viola, Youth Climate Strike LA, and Sim Bilal v. Caruso Management Company (filed 2022), challenging Rick Caruso companies suppressing protests against Caruso’s mayoral campaign

• Ben Camacho v. City of Los Angeles (filed 2022), challenging LAPD's refusal to provide photographs identifying its officers

• Amicus brief: City of Susanville v. California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (Cal. Superior Court), arguing on behalf of Timothy Peoples, Duane Palm, and Patrick Noel Everett that the City of Susanville's demands to keep the California Correctional Center open due to the city's financial need for prisoners must be analyzed within the legacy of slavery (filed 2022)

• Stop LAPD Spying Coalition v. City of Los Angeles (filed 2022), challenging LAPD's refusal to identify camera network installed in Echo Park Lake after violently clearing the park 

• Stop LAPD Spying Coalition v. City of Los Angeles (filed 2022), challenging City Councilman Paul Koretz's refusal to disclose communications with Simon Wiesenthal Center

• Greg Akili et al. v. City of Los Angeles (filed 2022), putative class action challenging LAPD's brutality towards their critics protesting outside Mayor Garcetti's mansion

• Black Lives Matter et al. v. City of Los Angeles (filed 2020 and I joined 2021), putative class action challenging LAPD's brutality and arrests of over 4,000 of their critics during the George Floyd uprising 

• Stop LAPD Spying Coalition v. City of Los Angeles (filed 2021), challenging LAPD secrecy over work with UCLA academics to test for-profit “predictive policing” technologies

• Stop LAPD Spying Coalition v. City of Los Angeles (filed 2021), challenging secrecy of LAPD budget records

• Cullors v. County of Los Angeles (filed 2020, after I helped develop), putative class action challenging endangerment of people inside county jails during the covid-19 pandemic

• Velesaca v. Wolf (filed 2020, after I helped develop up until 2019), putative class action challenging ICE's use of a "risk assessment algorithm" to detain virtually everyone it arrests 

• P.L. et al. v. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (filed 2019), putative class action challenging ICE's use of remote video-conferencing technology to expedite deportations

• R.C. v. City of New York (filed 2018), challenging NYPD’s secret use of sealed arrest records for “data-driven" policing and police propaganda

• Amicus brief: People v. Nicholas Hill (N.Y. Court of Appeals), arguing on behalf of the Bronx Defenders, the Center for Constitutional Rights, the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, and the New York Civil Liberties Union that the location of a police stop and race of the person stopped must be considered when analyzing how a "reasonable person" would have responded to police (filed 2018)

• Trowbridge v. Cuomo (filed 2016 and I joined 2018), challenging systemic yearslong delays in misdemeanor trials in the Bronx

• Ligon v. City of New York (filed 2012 and I joined 2018) challenging NYPD stop-and-frisk sweeps of private apartment buildings

Selected Writing

• Why Should Tenant Unions Look to Labor Law?, LPE Blog (September 6, 2023) (co-author)

• Police Technology and the Danger of Reform, Social Science Research Council: Just Tech (June 28, 2022)

• Co-optation and Counterinsurgency in Surveillance Reform, LPE Blog (March 15, 2022) (byline Stop LAPD Spying Coalition)

• Automating Banishment: The Data-Driven Policing of Stolen Land, Haymarket Books Live (January 14, 2022) (panelist)

• Dismantling the Ecosystem of Surveillance, Justice, Equity and Technology Project, London School of Economics (October 13, 2021) (co-presenter)

• The Ghosts of White Supremacy in AI Reform, AI Now Institute (Sept. 8, 2021) (byline Stop LAPD Spying Coalition)

• Data-Driven Policing: Abolition Requires a Culture of Resistance, The Abolitionist (Summer 2021) (byline Stop LAPD Spying Coalition)

• Yet Another Police Reform Proposal Designed to Expand the LAPD’s Stalker State, Knock LA (March 16, 2021) (co-author)

• Don’t Let Them Use “Domestic Terrorism” to Criminalize Our People Again, Knock LA (January 19, 2021) (co-author)

• Police Bureaucracy and Abolition: Why Reforms Driven by Professionals will Renew State Oppression, Counterpunch (September 17, 2020) (co-author)

• Extremists in Uniform, Dissent Magazine (March 18, 2017)

• How much money can you make from a prisoner?, London Review of Books Blog (March 8, 2017)

• What Lurks Below Beckles, Northwestern University Law Review (Febraury 2017) (co-author)

• The Return of Border Discrimination, Dissent Magazine (February 16, 2017)

• Sanctuary Cities in Name Only, New York Times (February 14, 2017) (co-author)

• Body Cameras Could Transform Policing –For the Worse, Al Jazeera America (April 17, 2015)

• Policing and Profit, Harvard Law Review (April 2015)

• Eric Garner and the Legal Rules That Enable Police Violence, New York Times (December 5, 2014) (co-author)