Mayor Breed withdraws proposal to gut city’s surveillance oversight law | Hacker News Reader

Mayor Breed withdraws proposal to gut city’s surveillance oversight law

aclunc.org

82 pointsarkadiyt37 comments

The question is whether the police should be allowed to view live footage owned by private organizations of an ongoing crime (such as the mass looting of the Louis Vuitton store in Union Square on Nov 19, 2021). Under current law, it takes at least 3 months for the police to install a camera or borrow a camera feed owned by a neighborhood nonprofit. The only exception is “an emergency involving imminent danger of death or serious physical injury to any person”, which is almost the same as the use of deadly force law (Penal Code 835a(c)(1)(A)). So basically, currently, the police are justified in borrowing a video feed of a criminal at the same instant that they are justified in killing the criminal. The Mayor tried to allow the police to borrow video feeds during property crime incidents, but Supervisor Aaron Peskin blocked her.

* The current surveillance policy https://codelibrary.amlegal.com/codes/san_francisco/latest/s...

* Penal Code 835a(c)(1)(A) https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySectio...

* Mayor London Breed’s proposed ordinance: Board File 220080 https://sfgov.legistar.com/LegislationDetail.aspx?ID=5397200...

* Peskin’s proposed initiative: Board File 220109 https://sfgov.legistar.com/LegislationDetail.aspx?ID=5397228...

What are the arguments against this policy? Is it that the police could use this as an excuse to just watch everyone all the time, saying "oops sorry we thought there was an ongoing crime"?

Yes, you’re right. The Mayor’s ordinance would encourage a proliferation of private cameras that could turn into police surveillance cameras any time there is an alleged crime, and requires only summary information after the event. This is an end run around the surveillance ordinance which allows the public to review a report about the cameras (software, camera type, location) before they are installed and to view an inventory of all public cameras.

There also seems to be quite a bit of anti-police animosity among activists in general.

Personally, I think the surveillance ordinance is probably too restrictive in prohibiting the police from using technology and not protective enough in ensuring proper policies for the use of the technology that is available. To me, what matters is that the technology is used with professional care, not that the inventory is enumerated months in advance.

Full video of Board of Supervisors Rules Committee hearing https://sanfrancisco.granicus.com/player/clip/40566?meta_id=...

The EFF’s lawsuit Williams v San Francisco (the police won on a technicality since their use of the cameras was grandfathered) https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/01/san-francisco-police-i...

A special law to help police investigate some crimes by some people, meanwhile Louis Vuitton pays a million dollars every other year to settle wage theft claims against their own employees.

https://violationtracker.goodjobsfirst.org/prog.php?parent=l...

Considering the amounts involved, the police should be demanding surveillance of their HR & recordkeeping operations.

I believe you are being downvoted because you introduced a red-herring. A second argument in response to the first that isn't related.

Most people here would probably agree that Louis Vuitton should be investigated, but that wasn't the grandfathers point.

Fair enough. In that case the policy should not be changed because the crimes involved are low-value and should not be a target of scarce (by the department's estimation) police resources, particularly with respect to the crimes being committed by the stores themselves.

More objective reporting on the withdrawal: https://sfstandard.com/city-hall/mayor-breed-peskin-ballot-m...

TL;DR: Seems Breed is close to a deal with the Board of Supervisors that would obviate the need for the ballot measure.

This should be the main URL. It's better than the current URL, which is a press release by a political entity that has skin in the game.

That political entity is the ACLU. Who certainly does have "skin in the game" but it's hardly a shady lobbying firm

They are hilariously partisan political activists. I'd never in a million years expect good coverage from modern ACLU.

The ACLU has changed dramatically in recent years, they are now better described as a partisan pressure group.

It’s the natural move and the eventual evolution of major US metros suffering from crime. As police forces continue to dwindle with less and less new recruits, local governments may not have a choice of disallowing surveillance when it’s a tool to help mitigate crime. Even before BLM and defund the police movements, on average US police departments only had 60% of the officers needed to effectively maintain order.

https://www.npr.org/2018/12/12/675359781/americas-growing-co...

Less people want to become a police officer because the pay doesn’t match both the physical and legal threats of the job. Constant overtime and local government’s bad habit of seeing every problem as a nail that could be solved by police has exacerbated the problem.

> local government’s bad habit of seeing every problem as a nail that could be solved by police

One of the messages that got buried under "defund the police" was "fund social services and nonlethal interventions instead".

Ironically many of the standard anti-government rightwing messages are true about some of America's many police forces. They're often over-funded and wasteful at the same time as being ineffective in terms of actually dealing with crime. Prejudice makes this worse: rather than investigating and dealing with the people actually responsible for crimes, it's easier to go round and find some people who "look criminal" and arrest them to boost your stats.

File under: Say what you're for, not what you're against.

> "fund social services and nonlethal interventions instead"

I've been racking my brains to divine a slogan or phrase or framing that captures this. Nadda.

I imagine Frank Luntz could do it. We need our own Frank Luntz.

talking about funding anything in America has been a losing game for decades now. "defund" was a tactical appeal to this ideology

Like most government programs that are "under funded" the solution is not actually more funding. The solution is doing a proper analysis of what they are doing with the money, and readjusting.

Specifically law enforcement, the root cause of almost everything is over criminalization of society, combined with "policing for profit" where cities pass all kinds of laws and then place priority of enforcement on laws that generate them the most revenue instead of public safety

This create a perverse feedback loop of violent or unpopular police interactions with the public.

Another factor in this is the way local and state government do budgeting. Police, Fire, Schools and Road (core services) are actually often the FIRST to have their budgets cut over social or other non-core services. This makes tax increases more palatable to the tax payers, as they are often willing to absorb tax increases for core services but not for non-core services. All tax money currently in most cities in fungible, so those that control the budgets can shift fund away from core services, create a crisis, then push for the public to access a tax increase to "solve" the crisis they created.

> Even before BLM and defund the police movements, on average US police departments only had 60% of the officers needed to effectively maintain order.

Yeah, no surprise there when almost all issues of society get offloaded onto police, and a barely trained one at that.

All that police is is a band-aid on existing, far-reaching issues in society - poverty and lack of access to mental health care being the worst contributors.

> on average US police departments only had 60% of the officers needed to effectively maintain order.

Might it have something to do with the shitty, corrupt culture in most of them?

SPD's been operating under a federal injunction for the past ten years. Ten years in and not a damn thing about it has changed. It's still an old boys' club that is allergic to integrity, flip-flopping between being the extremes of being actively useless, and completely out-of-control.

Not always. Oakland PD is notorious for no one wanting to work for, for obvious reasons. Across the Bay Area, Mountain View PD get paid $500k to do diddly-squat.

Was she feeling the spirit and didn't feel the proposal was necessary?

(This is a reference to her response when she ignored the city's indoor masking requirements, and then doubled down.. because "she was in the spirit and she felt like getting up and dancing" https://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/coronavirus/mayor-breed-says...)

Interesting - I thought she was into an issue here. Concern is that it would suppress activism and increase racism. Headlines are horrible though - we’ll see what actually happens - she is not mayor by chance

Sometimes headlines take me a few seconds to parse because of excessive "negatives"; this one has three: surveillance bad -> oversight good -> gut bad -> withdraw good. That's probably the most I've seen in a headline of this length. Just a totally off topic observation.

Doesn't help that "Breed" is also a verb. (Headlines are often in title case. Took me two passes to realize it wasn't.)

This headline is entirely straightforward ...

For a headline, sure. It's about a sequence of four events, and they're packed into nearly the most terse statement possible - it's well understood that this is the main job of a headline. But they're in nearly reverse chronological order, so by the time I reach the third event, my brain starts stumbling trying to figure out what the statement is actually about. If you don't have any context, it's almost completely backwards. Rewriting it with comprehension as the goal, you would get something like this:

The city surveillance program was subject to an oversight law, and Mayor Breed proposed gutting this law, but then withdrew the proposal.

Which, of course, would be a terrible headline, because it includes punctuation.

You mean they withdrew the proposal to remove the words that complicated the headline.

It might help if the headline mentioned which city. There are many.

It is San Francisco, for those who are not closely connected to the startup-hub life.

Possibly, although the first word in the article is literally San Francisco and it’s published by ACLU NorCal.

Are you implying that voters read past the headlines?

AFAIK Breed is the mayor of just one city.

Yes, and someone not living in the silicon valley bubble would have no clue which city Breed is the mayor of or why this is on HN.

(Answer: San Francisco)

Her first name doesn’t make things easier either

Right, but this is a YC site. YC is in San Francisco. Startups are in San Francisco. This is the place.

Yes and Harding is the mayor of one city. Are you interested in reading an article about that city? What city am I even talking about?

I'm not following. There are two mayor Hardings: Pierre SD, and Ipswich QLD.

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