Surveillance shift: San Francisco pilots program allowing police to live monitor private security cameras
Last week San Francisco city leaders approved a 15-month pilot allowing police to monitor live footage from surveillance cameras owned by consenting businesses and civilians without a warrant.
The 7-4 decision by the San Francisco board of supervisors was a major loss for a broad coalition of civil liberties groups that had argued the move would give police unprecedented surveillance powers. It also seemingly marked a departure from the progressive stance on surveillance the city’s leadership had previously maintained.
In May 2019, the board had made history by making the city the first to ban the use of facial recognition by any local government agency. At the time, supervisor Aaron Peskin said, the city had an “an outsize responsibility to regulate the excesses of technology”.
But more than three years, a pandemic and many protests against police injustice later, some members of the board now say they need to balance concerns for privacy with the need to allow law enforcement officials to “utilize certain technologies to make San Francisco safer”.
Privacy advocacy groups say the shift is part of a larger phenomenon in cities across the US, where fears of both perceived and real increases in crime have prompted police and elected officials to expand the use of surveillance technology, even if there isn’t always clear evidence those technologies are effective at deterring or solving crimes.
In Detroit, the city council is in the midst of a months-long back and forth on whether to expand its contract with gunshot detection company ShotSpotter. And the city of New Orleans this summer rolled back parts of its own pioneering facial recognition ban, allowing police to request the use of the controversial technology.
“People are being told there’s a rise in crime and maybe they’re experiencing some themselves and they want to see something being done about it,” Dave Maass, the director of investigations at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a civil liberties organization, said. “And for elected officials, throwing money at surveillance technology is an easy political thing to do.”
It’s a continuation of tech solutionism, Maass argued: “Vendors come in promising the world with these technologies without talking about the risks or threats and policymakers just swallow it without questioning it.” -->
Like many cities in the US, San Francisco in the past years has seen complicated shifts in its crime dynamics, witnessing a rise in reported homicides and certain property crimes but a decline in overall reports of violent crime.
Still, many residents and business owners in the city say they perceive crime to be on the rise. And the city has made national headlines with highprofile smash-and-grabs; high rates of car break-ins and a persistent homelessness emergency, putting pressure on the city’s moderate mayor, London Breed.
Proponents have argued that accessing real time video footage will help alleviate deficiencies caused by staffing shortages at the San Francisco police department – a sentiment echoed by some of the city’s business improvement districts, non-profit groups created in partnership with the city that focuses on bettering specific commercial areas in SF. “With so many fewer officers, the easier we can make their job the better,” Tracy Everwine, who leads the Mid-Market business district, told the SF Standard.
The office of Breed, who sponsored the private camera legislation, praised the board’s decision and said it “balances the need to give our police officers another tool to address significant public safety challenges and to hold those who break the law accountable”.
The mayor’s office said the program was a “sensible” policy with “strong guardrails against misuse of this technology”.
That includes the “right of the owner or operator to refuse any request for access, a mandate that the police maintain a log of all written requests for access that are auditable upon demand, training for any officer who would have access to video, and explicit prohibitions against using temporary live video access to target anyone for exercising their first amendment rights”, the mayor’s office said.
The change in tone was not unanimous among all of the city’s legislators. Supervisor Dean Preston, who voted against the ordinance, told Axios he was “saddened” by how far the board had come from the shared “commitment to changing our city and our society from a society that overpolices, over-surveils, over-criminalizes and over-incarcerates people, particularly Black and brown people”.
“There’s no evidence that the kind of broader surveillance, especially the live surveillance … reduces crime or makes us safer in any way,” he continued.
Civil liberties advocates argued the expansion of surveillance camera access for police was another sign that business interests trumped those of the city’s residents. It’s a “circumvention of the public will”, said Steven Renderos, the executive director of the racial and economic advocacy group Media Justice. He described the facial recognition ban as a policy that came out of the will of the people and the new ordinance as one that was lobbied for by the city’s business districts and entrepreneurs.
“I fear for a city that has been shaped by the perspectives of the few and the perspectives of the few are the ones influencing policy decisions,” Renderos said.
The coalition has also argued there’s little evidence that accessing live feeds from surveillance cameras could help prevent or solve crimes, citing a 2008 UC Berkeley study that shows the presence of cameras did not significantly deter crimes from being committed. A 2016 study out of Newark, New Jersey, found similar results, indicating that with the exception of auto theft, a closed circuit camera network did not show a significant reduction in crime.
“A lot of the folks who came out to support the proposal and support the policy were business owners who work in the retail space who just have concerns about retail theft and crime,” said Jennifer Jones, a technology and civil liberties attorney at the ACLU. “Unfortunately, they don’t necessarily interrogate this presumption that live camera surveillance could actually do anything to prevent that or make that better.”
They also pointed to the potential for police to exploit the mechanism to infringe on first amendment protected activity like protests. Last year, the ACLU sued the SFPD for accessing live feeds from surveillance cameras in the city’s Union Square district during a protest against police brutality in response to the murder of George Floyd. The ACLU ultimately lost the lawsuit (and is now appealing the decision)but alleged in it that the police violated the city’s ordinance that requires prior approval for using any surveillance technology.
“The problem is SFPD has shown itself to be unaccountable when it comes to surveillance,” Maass said. “Even when there are rules in place they don’t want to follow the rules.”
Ultimately, the board decided that the 15-month trial period included enough guardrails to move forward and evaluate the program’s efficacy. “As I said the other day, is this perfect?” Peskin said to Axios. “Probably not. Is it worth a try? I think so.”
Supervisors Preston and Peskin did not respond to a request for comment.