San Francisco DA backs police plan for live surveillance using private cameras
sfstandard.com
sfstandard.com
It annoys me that people are discussing the benefits, when the cost isn't even remotely acceptable.
But this is hard work, and a lot of people just opt for a heuristic of 'look at the problem from both sides and split the difference'. This is often adequate for many small problems, but when you start applying that approach to value judgments it makes people alarmingly easy to manipulate.
Isn't it strange? If crime drops, the answer is more surveillance. If somewhere, someone used encryption as one small part of a crime, the answer is more surveillance. And if crime is caught on camera, and the police do nothing about it, the answer is, again, more surveillance.
I can't remember the details exactly but there is a part in 1984 where they travel out into forest to find a place where they aren't under surveillance. Even then they notice a camera on a tree or something they have to stand just out of range of.
As opposed to "good old fashioned police work"? How is this better and how would they even implement this? Seems like a policy just to say something on the subject...
Edit:
From later in the article: “We have since secured the district with the help of the mayor and the police department,” said Rodriguez [head of the Union Square business improvement district], a former prosecutor. “But we don’t know the next time that people will strike—and this will help us prevent that.”
Are cameras really are a deterrent? Seems they can sometimes help catch perpetrators after the act...
Do you live here in SF? Because I doubt anyone who lives here would agree about the crime wave being "fictional", unless they live in a sufficiently ritzy neighborhood where they are well-insulated from the obvious effects.
There is no crime wave. There is a lot of drug use and mental illness visible on the streets in two small neighborhoods in the entire city. The Tenderloin and Soma which wrap the now, post covid, more vacant downtown. The rest of the city is as clean and safe as ever.
Here’s the real thing to consider. I’m sure you, like most people that voted to remove the DA and support this insane surveillance initiative, do not live in the affected neighborhoods. You won’t be now subjected to 24 hour police surveillance just for the crime of living in the wrong zip code like myself and my neighbors will.
We tried broken windows policing for 30 years. And all it did was balloon the criminal records of young males who were unlucky enough to live in the zip codes and neighborhoods that received the majority of police attention in cities throughout the country. Leave my neighborhood alone. If you want to live in a 24 hour police state, enable it for your neighborhood first.
The reality is that once downtown recovers from the office vacancies caused by the covid remote work shift, things will return to normal. With or without putting me under 24 hour surveillance.
People who live in this city disagree with you. See the DA recall.
> There is a lot of drug use and mental illness visible on the streets in two small neighborhoods in the entire city. The Tenderloin and Soma which wrap the now, post covid, more vacant downtown.
And Mission, and Haight, and countless other areas. Sure some of these are not absolute disaster areas like some of the others, but I think you've become far too accustomed to the utter disgustingness of much of the city.
> The rest of the city is as clean and safe as ever.
That's not saying much. Don't worry, Pac Heights and Mission Bay are nice and clean!
> Here’s the real thing to consider. I’m sure you, like most people that voted to remove the DA and support this insane surveillance initiative, do not live in the affected neighborhoods. You won’t be now subjected to 24 hour police surveillance just for the crime of living in the wrong zip code like myself and my neighbors will.
I live close enough to the Tenderloin to be affected by it daily, and yes I'm very happy the insane DA was recalled.
> We tried broken windows policing for 30 years. And all it did was balloon the criminal records of young males who were unlucky enough to live in the zip codes and neighborhoods that received the majority of police attention in cities throughout the country.
Oh please. We've been coddling criminals here for decades. There is massive amounts of crime here because criminals know that they can act with impunity.
> The reality is that once downtown recovers from the office vacancies caused by the covid remote work shift, things will return to normal. With or without putting me under 24 hour surveillance.
People have been complaining about how dirty the city is, and the crazy drug-abusing homeless for a long time at this point. It would be nice if we could improve on that instead of going back to that.
No one is "manufacturing" this. There's a reason the DA was recalled, and it's not because SF residents were "tricked by Republicans".
Police are of course part of this, but are prosecutors, and lawmakers.
You can be pedantic and say there's no "crime wave", but there is absolutely a discernible increase in crime.