What’s with all the cameras around San Francisco?
Chris Larsen knows that a crypto mogul spending his own money for a city camera surveillance system might sound creepy. He’s here to explain why it’s not
SANFRANCISCO>> It sounds sinister. A softspoken cryptocurrency mogul is paying for a private network of high-definition security cameras around the city. Zoom in and you can see the finest details: the sticker on a cellphone, the make of a backpack, the color of someone’s eyes.
But in San Francisco, a city with a decades-long anti-authority streak, from hippies and pioneering gay rights activists to the techno-utopian libertarians and ultra-progressives of today, the crypto mogul has found a surprisingly receptive audience.
Here’s why: While violent crime is not high in the city, property crime is a constant headache. Anyone who lives here knows you shouldn’t leave anything not a pile of change, not a scarf in a parked car. Tourists visiting the city’s vistas like Twin Peaks or the famously windy Lombard Street are easy marks. The city government has struggled to solve the problem.
In the middle of this is Chris Larsen, a 59-year-old tech industry veteran, paying for hundreds of cameras. He sees it as an alternative system of urban security, and he hopes it becomes a model for other cities.
This just may be the best moment for him to explain why a rich guy paying for surveillance cameras all over a city is not a terrifying invasion of privacy. Around the country, Black Lives Matter movement protests have led to a reckoning on policing and how it should be done. Many of the activists leading this movement are fighting to abolish or defund reduce funding for police departments. Last week in New York, for example, the mayor announced the police budget would be cut by $1 billion.
In San Francisco, where many locals push for this kind of police reform, those same locals are tired of the break-ins. So how do they reconcile “defund the police” with “stop the smash and grabs”?
Larsen believes he has the answer: Put security cameras in the hands of neighborhood groups. Put them everywhere. He’s happy to pay for it.
The local cryptocurrency guy
First, let’s state the obvious reason besides privacy concerns that Larsen’s plan might be viewed with suspicion: He’s in tech.
In 1997, Larsen cofounded an online lending company called ELoan, which went public two years later, and he stayed on as chief executive until 2005. In 2012, he co-founded a startup that would be called Ripple, which helped people send money online using so-called blockchain technology and the digital token called XRP. During the peak of the speculator-crazed crypto boom of 2017, its value spiked wildly. Larsen became one of the few crypto entrepreneurs to make and then hang onto that overnight fortune.
His apartment on Russian Hill has a trophy view of San Francisco Bay and the tight curves of Lombard Street. But also: the crews coming in to rob tourists’ cars, right in the middle of the day. Larsen watches police drive by, and the criminals arriving 15 seconds later, smashing the vehicles’ windows and stealing luggage.
“They don’t care at all they don’t care if they’re being seen,” Larsen said. “It’s brazen.”
His father-in-law’s car was robbed. Larsen’s own car windows were smashed. When a group of men climbed into his garden and one of them cut the wires on his home security system, while his children were sleeping inside, Larsen decided that he had had enough.
The camera network
When I wrote to Larsen
asking for an interview, he immediately said yes, and he answered all of my questions. He said he knew that what he was doing might raise concerns, so he wanted to be open about it.
Here is what he is doing: Writing checks for nearly $4 million to buy cameras that record high-definition video of the streets and paying to have them maintained by a company called Applied Video Solutions The rest is up to locals in neighborhood coalitions like Community Benefit Districts, known as CBDs, nonprofits formed to provide services to the area.
Here is how the project works: Neighbors band together and decide where to put the cameras. They are installed on private property at the discretion of the property owner, and in San Francisco many home and business owners want them. The footage is monitored by the neighborhood coalition. The cameras are always recording.
The cameras are not hidden. Larsen believes they can serve as both deterrent and aid in investigations, but it is difficult to say how effective they have been in reducing overall crime.
Camera surveillance is happening in a lot of cities, but usually it is managed by police departments. In London, there are around 420,000 closed-circuit cameras, according to a 2017 report by the Brookings Institution, and the city has begun testing using facial recognition software. In New York, too, cameras are common. In Newark, New Jersey, anyone with an internet connection can watch the streets from the city’s police cameras, which have a Newark police department placard to warn that the area is under surveillance.
San Francisco is unique in that the cameras are not being installed and monitored by police but by private citizens, and it is unique in that one person is paying for so much of it.
Larsen started installing them in 2012 with just a few around his neighborhood. These days, he funds a network of more than 1,000. He funds the CBDs to control and monitor them. He funds the longstanding nonprofit SF Safe, which supports neighborhood watch groups and the Police Department.
Some of the city’s densest neighborhoods and commercial corridors like Union Square, Japantown, Fisherman’s Wharf, the Tenderloin and Russian Hill have signed on, and now the network includes 135 blocks.
From Japantown’s restaurants and nursing homes to the Union Square shopping district, business and homeowners have welcomed his cameras. Every neighborhood has sought to expand their program since installing. As proponents of Larsen’s network see things, they get the safety of a surveillance state without the state.
“If you went to the board of supervisors and asked the members to approve this, you’d end up having a conversation about government and surveillance,” said Simon Bertrang, head of a CBD that is a coalition of businesses, residents and property owners in the Tenderloin.
A few of the neighborhoods watch the footage live, others don’t. If someone wants the footage a police officer or a crime victim or a defense lawyer they ask the neighborhood coalition for it.
His ally in all of this is someone very different and a little surprising: Chesa Boudin, the new, ultraprogressive district attorney of
San Francisco.
Boudin likes Larsen and vice versa.
The community groups
In January, Larsen and Boudin met in Japantown and walked to its Community Benefit District office. It was a small office with three desks, one tiny dog bed, and two large screens with live video of the streets. The screens are monitored by the two-person benefit district staff. That equipment is paid for by Larsen. The rest was paid by the benefit district members.
One side effect of the cameras is that when one CBD installs them, it seems to push crime just a few blocks away, Larsen said.
“It’s whack-a-mole,” Larsen said.
The same day as the Japantown meeting, Larsen and Boudin drove to the CBD headquarters in the Tenderloin, the city’s roughest neighborhood. They sat at a folding table with about 10 people. Conspicuously not present: anyone from the Police Department.
Last year, someone was shot dead right in front of the office during a team meeting. Shootings have more than doubled in the neighborhood, up 130% in a year, they said. Since the coronavirus pandemic began, the number of tents for homeless people in the neighborhood had ballooned from around 120 to around 400, until a lawsuit from local residents led the city to move the tent-dwellers into safe sleeping sites, the group’s leader, Bertrang, said.
“We don’t have a good law enforcement response right now,” Boudin told the group. “It takes 10 cops to do a single drug bust, costs $20,000 or something. And I don’t want my attorneys to be doing this for no benefit on the street.”
The privacy fears
The protest movement that is rocking police departments around the country hinges on videos. The shaking cellphone videos of killings have captured moments so irrefutable that it has inspired rage from more corners than just longtime police reform activists. Calls to defund police departments are getting real traction.
And into this Larsen presents his solution: Go around the police.
“This has underscored the importance of not just cameras but of communitywide camera coverage,” Larsen said. “Bodycams show some pretty core weaknesses because we don’t have universal access to police bodycam footage, and there’s a fundamental conflict of interest if the video shows something bad for the department.”
The answer is more cameras, he said, and then keep that footage in the hands of citizens.
Larsen argued that trust will come in the form of full city camera coverage, so police can play a smaller, more subtle role. Individual vigilantism will not work, he argued, but strong neighborhoods with continuous video feeds on every corner will.
“That’s the winning formula,” Larsen said. “Pure coverage.”