San Francisco police can now watch private surveillance cameras in real time
theverge.com
theverge.com
We should all be proud of what technology has achieved for society, further reducing the risk of being a police officer. What great benefit to the residents of San Francisco. Many more officers will make it to retirement age to make use of their oversized pensions since they won't even need to worry about possibly being cajoled into action and having to foot chase a thief when they can simply watch crime occur unabated from the comfort of their offices and homes.
This is a direct result of the politicians that the residents elected. When you have a DA that doesn't prosecute offenders and releases them after police go through the work of arresting, gathering evidence, writing reports, booking, etc over and over again you'll start to get police that wont do those things because its simply a waste of their time.
What I described above is a very common recurring trend from verified officers that work in major cities like SF that have gone soft on crime over the past few years.
The police are the problem with police, regardless of whatever distractions they say are to blame.
the "point" would be in part:
1. Actually doing their job. No one can blame police if the DA or a lawyer or a judge fucks up and a "bad guy" walks. We can/will blame them if they refuse to do the job they are paid for.
2. It gets a "bad guy" off the street for 4+ hours. That's 4+ hours where the people police are supposed to be protecting don't have to worry about the criminal.
3. Keeping the record. Even assuming a terrible DA is letting everyone police arrest go free, someday a non-terrible DA is going to come into office and when a case file hits their desk they're going to want to know if the person arrested has been arrested one time or 20 times over the last x number of years. They're going to want to review reports and evidence from those incidents as well.
I also want to challenge the notion that putting even more people in prison is going to solve these problems. The US has the world's highest incarceration rate. And not just by a little; we're ~5x the UK, ~10x Scandinavia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_incarcera...
We've tried mass incarceration to reduce crime. It does not work. Trying it a bit harder after decades of it not working is not going to suddenly and magically produce a different result.
Not wanting to do the job. On the contrary, they want to do the job, that's why they become LEO in the first place. The problem is that leadership won't let them do the job, tying their hands and undoing the work they do (by releasing known violent criminals and other predators)
Add in the talent-drain and it gets even worse. Why would a 20 year man stay on for 5 more years to train the new guard when it is just easier to retire now and not deal with activist leadership, people spitting on you, and DAs who let your collars (the one that almost got you stabbed) walk in a few hours?
This applies in reverse to the lack of accountability and closing of ranks when police do something that's out of line. Why would police departments expect citizens to treat them with respect when enforcement of the law within their own ranks is so poor?
The problem is that crime is not being prosecuted as it should. The fault lies with the DA's office. Any other "solution" you offer will not actually resolve the effects of the problem until that problem is solved.
Once that problem is solved, I can guarantee you will see arrests increase. Maybe you're one of the ones who don't want that?
Meanwhile, when a police officer beats up or even murders someone, often an entire city has to protest for that violent criminal to even be charged. And their coworkers, purported employees of the public trust, purported believers in law and order, go on and on justifying the assailant's actions as if they should be normalized.
Why open yourself up to liability, danger, just to have the DA let the person off and back out.
Fix the issue from the top. It's specific DA's in specific areas that are the problem.
The police don’t get to decide whether people are guilty or can be convicted in court. Whether the DA prosecutes people adequately is a political problem. Whether the city spends millions employing cops that don’t do anything is also a political problem.
The DA is either letting too many people go or the mayor is keeping too many police.
Personally I believe certain DAs are completely out of line and don't reflect the will of the people, but the will of certain donors.
But they were already successful in their “get paid while on strike” protest to overthrow the D. A. in favor of their favored alternative, so shouldn’t their defenders at least come up with a new excuse for their continued nonfeasance?
I'm curious, do you think the previous DA did a good job or did you support the recall?
-- EDIT @dragonwriter --
> I think that debate is about as relevant to the law enforcement problems in San Francisco as a debate over the china pattern in the first class dining room is to the problems with the maiden voyage of RMS Titanic.
It's very much relevant as we were talking about the performance of the DA and you brought up the recall itself.
You could have easily voiced your opinion of the DA instead of spouting off a silly analogy.
-- EDIT2 @dragonwriter ---
> since apparently you’re doing upthread edits in lieu of responding
> No, its not relevant to the point that SFPD apologists
blaming the past DAs prosecutorial approach for why SFPD won't arrest people now after they succesfully got that past DA thrown out and replaced based on that argument makes no sense.
> It doesn’t really matter if they were right about Boudin when he was in office, that’s moot when it comes to their current (in)action when he isn’t.
I find it very interesting that you have no problem trying to put blame on the SFPD, who have little control in policies other than striking for change, which they did, while not even wanting to comment on the previous DA which generated the problems which led to the recent recall.
> It doesn’t really matter if they were right about Boudin when he was in office, that’s moot when it comes to their current (in)action when he isn’t.
It will take time for the negative incentives to influence the criminals. This is why it's important to always enforce the law and not just let people out.
I think that debate is about as relevant to the law enforcement problems in San Francisco as a debate over the china pattern in the first class dining room is to the problems with the maiden voyage of RMS Titanic.
EDIT:
since apparently you’re doing upthread edits in lieu of responding:
> It's very much relevant as we were talking about the performance of the DA and you brought up the recall itself
No, its not relevant to the point that SFPD apologists blaming the past DAs prosecutorial approach for why SFPD won't arrest people now after they succesfully got that past DA thrown out and replaced based on that argument makes no sense.
It doesn’t really matter if they were right about Boudin when he was in office, that’s moot when it comes to their current (in)action when he isn’t.
Watching crimes happen via security cameras.
If what you say is true, what police officers are refusing to do is their job. And it's not that different than many other jobs out there. They're not elected officials, it's not their job to legislate or choose who to prosecute.
When you arrest the same person over and over again and they are just let out by the DA, you may just not arrest that person again.
You aren't refusing to do your job, you're listening to an elected official that has more power than you do.
Do you have any criticisms to direct at the DA, or do you agree with their actions?
Maybe if we treated cops like people with jobs, we'd be able to hire some that work.
Great, so everyone agrees the current approach doesn't work. Now we need to come up with a better solution.
Option 1 is to throw these repeat offenders in jail and consider the situation fixed.
Option 2 is to take the money that we are paying the cop that now refuses to arrest anyone and instead pay someone who is willing to work with this repeat offender and help get them a home, job, treatment, or whatever else they need to stop living life like this.
Police that refuse to do their job because the DA's office is politically indoctrinated are not helping anything. It's almost immature. Police have unions and associations, political connections (even today), connections with the press (even today), so we're not talking about some powerless sector of society.
The mature response is for SF police to do its job (because if we do the math, it is also wasting the time of criminals), and have its organizational arms make a stink about it in the public space. Publish statistics and weekly 'wtf DA?' blog posts. I mean it's the 21st century.
The original line of argument was that crime went up because punishments went don't. This implicitly is built on the belief that criminals are rational actors responding to a changing incentive structure. We can therefore reduce crime by changing the incentives again so that crime is a less attractive option. There is no reason why that change needs to be the reintroduction of harsh punishments. We can also change incentives by reducing the positive benefit of crime by making sure people's basic needs are satisfied.
I am living a comfortable life, all of my basic needs are satisfied, and I have never stolen anything. But if I could just walk into a store, grab things and walk out with the knowledge that I was not going to be punished for it in any way, I absolutely would. Why wouldn't I? Because it's "wrong"? I'm sorry but the world doesn't work that way. If I didn't, someone else would.
That's a pretty cynical view of human nature that I don't share.
> But if I could just walk into a store, grab things and walk out with the knowledge that I was not going to be punished for it in any way, I absolutely would.
I absolutely wouldn't. I mean, zero-consequence thefts seem to be a true state of affairs for many places like pharmacies in SF, and yet I don't feel any desire to walk into a Walgreens and start walking out with stuff without paying. Sure, I'm pretty comfortable financially, and that's a factor. But I would have to be pretty hard-up financially, like "I'm going to be out on the streets if I don't steal" levels of hard-up, to consider stealing at all, let alone habitually (and I'd still feel guilty about it). And I frankly can't blame people in that position; in many cases society has failed them, so I can't fault them for ignoring society's rules.
> Why wouldn't I? Because it's "wrong"?
Yes! Laws only work because people agree that they're a good idea in general, even if we may not agree with every individual law. I agree with laws around theft because I think it's shitty to deprive someone else of something that's theirs. Maybe it's a little muddier in the "personalization" aspect when we're talking about goods for sale owned by a huge corporation, but massive, ongoing, consequence-free theft from a particular store means that store is eventually going to shut down, and deprive regular people from jobs and their livelihoods. I wouldn't want that on my conscience.
> I'm sorry but the world doesn't work that way. If I didn't, someone else would.
Ah, yes, the "if I'm not an asshole, someone else will be, so I might as well just be an asshole and reap undeserved rewards" anti-morality play. That's reprehensible; I strongly suggest you re-evaluate your approach to being a human.
You remind me of the dude who made that one bike comic. If someone stole something you own, you'd be happy because "society failed them"? I assume you've never actually been victim of or even witnessed any kind of crime, because you'd probably change your mind if you did.
>Laws only work because people agree that they're a good idea in general
No, laws are created because most people think they're a good idea, they work because they are enforced. A law that is not enforced is a law that effectively does not exist.
>Ah, yes, the "if I'm not an asshole, someone else will be, so I might as well just be an asshole and reap undeserved rewards" anti-morality play. That's reprehensible; I strongly suggest you re-evaluate your approach to being a human.
The only reason you don't agree with this is because you're not surrounded by other people reaping undeserved rewards. It's very easy to say "I would never do that!" in an environment where nobody else does it. Have you ever heard of "looting"? Because that's literally what I described in action. If people know for a fact they can get away from stealing from a store, there will be no shortage of people willing to do it. If you'd stand there and watch while everyone else gets their free stuff, knowing the store will be cleaned out by the end of the day regardless, good for you, but your own morality does not change the facts.
Society doesn’t owe you anything; you owe society.
These are the same thing. There is one decision, either commit crime or don't. There are positive and negative incentives on each side.
>For example, stealing comes with the inherent reward of gaining whatever it is you stole. You don't need to be homeless and starving to want more money or physical goods.
Sure, but if you are homeless and starting your motivation to steal go up because that money represents a greater marginal improvement to your life. Would you disagree with that?
>But if I could just walk into a store, grab things and walk out with the knowledge that I was not going to be punished for it in any way, I absolutely would. Why wouldn't I? Because it's "wrong"? I'm sorry but the world doesn't work that way. If I didn't, someone else would.
It is always funny to me when someone admits they have no morals and think that means no one else has morals. There have been studies that show most people don't operate this way. For example, a majority of people will try to return a lost wallet and that percentage goes up when the amount of cash in the wallet increases[1]. How do you explain that?
[1] - https://www.npr.org/2019/06/20/734141432/what-dropping-17-00...
No. I never claimed that nobody has ever committed a crime due to being poor or homeless. All I'm saying is that the claim that solving homelessness and poverty would also solve crime is objectively wrong.
"How do you explain that?"
So that doesn't map onto anonymously stealing from a store which many people, if not most people, would do if there were guaranteed to be no criminal or social consequences. Empirically the correlation between income and shoplifting wasn't that high, last I checked. And studies of people cheating show it is more common than not, last I checked. Almost everyone eats meat, despite the knowledge it's morally reprehensible, simply because it's still within the Overton Window for now. Eating meat is more morally reprehensible than shoplifting, the only reason people do the former and not the latter is social acceptability.
By design, people are intrinsically selfish creatures. Any motivations that present as altruistic are either cultural mind viruses, disingenuous virtue signalling, or strategies (such as popularity and recognition seeking) we unconsciously selfishly employ to improve happiness (proximate reason) and genetic fitness (underlying reason).
Even when using stunted amoral analysis of human behavior, who cares what's the reason people are justifying moral acts?
It’s an absolute joke and it is typical black and white American policy making that’s causing this situation to be far worse than it needs to be.
I think what we need to do is to reintroduce short-term but painful punishments (a day in the stocks, public caning, etc) for moderately severe offenses. Some people need more than just a slap on the wrist to change, but don't deserve to have their life ruined forever by a 30-year jail sentence. Physical pain and public shaming have worked well for millions of years (literally) they still work today in many countries, and they are far more compassionate than a long jail sentence. Humans are just another animal species, sometimes animal incentives are what we need.
That's certainly not everyone, but I suspect if we were to deal with the subset that is "misunderstood" in a more productive way, SF crime would be a lot more tractable.
We used to know how to deal with these people, and many countries still do. Corporal punishment and public shaming have been the go-to solutions for millions of years. We should bring them back. You can make a criminal deeply and viscerally regret their crime, without destroying their life.
People have a hard time with the idea that caning or standing on the street with a sandwich board detailing your crime can be the empathic answer. Better than letting you hurt others, and letting the crime harden you until you need harsher responses.
> Like serial shoplifters, first-time drunk drivers, non-violent drug dealers…
Then non-violent drug dealer has to mean someone selling something that can't kill or seriously injure you. Fentanyl dealers might as well be selling arsenic and should be treated accordingly.
Why work 20 days a month and make a modest living when you can steal and rob 3 days a month, fence on the 4th, and live in relative luxury?
Throwing people in jail doesn't help with crimes of despair, but it does help with such calculated crime, because it suddenly is no longer worth it.
I don't think you realize that you are agreeing with me.
There are benefits to committing crime.
There are benefits to not committing crime.
There are downsides to committing crime.
There are downsides to not committing crime.
These all come together to help influence a person's decision. We can impact that decision by tweaking any one of these 4 results. Yes, increasing the penalties for crime is one way to address it, but we can have the same influence be decreasing the benefit of committing crime or increasing the benefit of not committing crime. I happen to think that is the morally superior choice because the result is fewer people in jail and the US already jails more people per capita than any other country.
Without punishment, the benefit of stealing $1000 is roughly $1000.
Again, I'm not talking about crimes of desperation, I'm talking about "I want $shiny_expensive_thing and stealing it/stealing for it is going to be an easier way to get that than working for it".
>Why work 20 days a month and make a modest living when you can steal and rob 3 days a month, fence on the 4th, and live in relative luxury?
What if that modest living takes 10 days of work instead of 20. Do you think that will impact the number of people who turn to crime?
2) If the modest living takes 10 instead of 20 days, it will reduce the number of crimes, but not to a level where it would be ok to just ignore without enforcement. And once your 10 days (or many times 10 days) of honest work disappear in one criminal act, and you see that crimes pay and aren't punished, you'll also be tempted to go the easy way.
It also doesn't matter what the punishment is or isn't, most people aren't going to steal a bike off the street. Most people have morals. Most people don't want to view themselves as a bad person. Most people require some sort of personal justification before they steal something. Desperation is a strong justification. Societal unfairness is a strong justification. The lack of punishment can't be used justify the crime from a moral perspective so it won't impact the way most people behave. It will only impact the people at the margins who were already open to committing crime.
We should reintroduce short-term but painful punishments (a day in the stocks, public caning, etc) for moderately severe offenses. Some people need more than just a slap on the wrist to change, but don't deserve to have their life ruined forever by a 30-year jail sentence. Physical pain and public shaming have worked well for millions of years (literally) they still work today in many countries, and they are far more compassionate than a long jail sentence. Humans are just another animal species, sometimes animal incentives are what we need.
For a different analogy, at a startup, the pm changes the requirements every so often, therefore the engineers are fine to play foosball all day?
The problem was the DA was letting people off even though they were breaking said laws.
Personally, "effectiveness of police" isn't a make-or-break criterion for me for where to live. I agree that petty property crime is out of control in this city, but I never feel physically unsafe. And regarding property crime itself, my car is garaged, and when it's out and about I never leave anything in it visible from the windows. As for my home, I live on the 4th floor and have two big heavy doors, one with a deadbolt, between me and the street. Home break-ins are pretty rare in my neighborhood anyway, but even if someone did want to break into a home around here, my home is not the low-hanging fruit that a burglar would zero in on first.
The ones without garages, without strong security systems, in worse off neighborhoods, etc.
Unfortunately higher income people only act when it reaches their doorstep, which happens more gradually.
Their tools and tactics simply can't hold back a catastrophic failure anymore than an engineer with a shovel.
In a functioning Society, 99% of the crime prevention is done by citizens. This takes the forms of community support, cohesion, self-respect, and having something to lose.
I don't know how to get back to that from where we are today
They left a vacuum which was filled by anger, jealousy, narcissism, entitlement, and even more consumerism than before.
I'm not familiar with SF, but in my little liberal-city-overrun-with-homeless-drug-addicts, the cops want to arrest more criminals, but the people they arrest get released immediately back out to the public again, so it's sort of like, why even bother?
This is a time for introspection of the type of government structures and leadership, not knee-jerk reaction. Probably feels satisfying to call cops pigs and donut munchers but that’s the lowest blow you can strike.
It is time for progressives to start looking inwards and resist the urge to scape goat Capitalism, Cops, Inequality, etc. Study from how good governing cities look like and learn from it. Educate the public. Purge administrative class that delivers nothing for the taxes people pay.
I have no idea from what perspective your argument comes from. Frankly, I don't think you do, either. But I think in speaking to any resident of San Francisco you will hear many trends like this relating to lopsided (mis)use of police resources, and it comes in many flavors.
Oh my god, the mental gymnastics here are mind-numbing.
Why not just fix the plethora of existing fundamental crises plaguing the city which are directly to blame for rising crime?
Fraud is at an all-time high too, do I get a live feed of the private offices of high-ranking financial executives?
I know the playbook, I know this is Police State 101, but are we really so lazy and pathetic that we still accept this answer as citizens?
When will we finally remember that police and lawmakers are our public servants and not the other way around? This should be cause for protest across the entire tech industry. We can afford to take off work.
What are we going to do about this?
Given the corruption revelations / charges that have come out of City Hall, SF residents should get live feeds (with audio) of all offices of city officials.
I'd suggest SF instead create a website where citizens can upload their own private videos of crimes being committed and actually expect a police follow-up.
There are thousands of SF citizens that have the exact GPS location of their stolen phone, bike, etc. You know where there's one stolen item there are likely many more, why not use the evidence we have that citizens are pleading with SFPD to take action upon (to no avail).
The only problem with either of these approaches is that it exposes the accused to vigilante action without due process.
Besides the public discussion which we all heard, do you have any evidence that policing budgets actually shrank? My understanding is that they largely did not (and mostly grew). So you really don't seem to be arguing in good faith.
Data shows that crime occurs in highly concentrated areas, and those are typically the undesirable areas of the city where police rarely patrol. I also question the efficacy of city-wide patrols now that every citizen is carrying a phone and can easily call in an issue.
How would crime change if we committed just 2% of the 2000+ SF police force on permanent patrol in tenderloin? That's something like 20 officers walking around tenderloin at all times, it would make the open-air drug market significantly more difficult. You could commit 10% or 200 officers to tracking down citizen-sourced live-GPS crime. Car breakins where a GPS device was taken (airtag is present, or cellphone/airpods was taken).
I'd wager that those 12% of officers would make more total arrests than the 88% doing patrols throughout the rest of the city.
There's a lot of value in having patrols even in low crime areas. It means that when something does go horribly wrong, or even when residents just need help, that help isn't terribly far away. It also prevents "police free zones" which criminals would quickly discover and be happy to exploit. That said, police certainly should be patrolling areas where crime is more prevalent more frequently.
Maybe elect somebody different, or run yourself if you feel so strongly about it.
The number of Amazon ring cameras sold suggests that we'll not only accept it, we'll pay for the privilege of bringing the police state right into our own homes!
The justification of this is pretty obvioulsy, police love [d-cking around with] Police State surveillance tools, which have as much allure as their military cosplay as well as providing a rich vein of feeding off public funding and associated grift payback and political donation.
The actual use case which translates into public safety, especially with respect to property crime and the cluster of adjacent unenforced lifestyle-degrading failures of SF policing, seem to in no way justify the expenditure.
And that is 100x as true because plain old community policing consistently proves infinitely better return on value.
Not that actual proven return on value ever provokes investment in plain old community and social welfare, in our current dystopia...
Community policing requires cops, and lots of them. SFPD is hemorrhaging talent, and why wouldn't it? Who would want to work somewhere with a sky-high cost of living, a populace who largely despises you, and an mostly-hostile City Hall? The best officers are lateraling out to better climes and recruitment numbers are falling.
Also, it's very true that they don't go after many crimes, but they do spend resources on things like attempted murder, rape, etc. Too bad about your car, though...
EDIT- To answer your question, SFPD works when they feel like it. When they do they want it to be easy. Local politics means there’s no real accountability that an increase is their power would come with increased expectations, so why wouldn’t they take as much as they can get
Seattle recently elected a hard-Republican city attorney, who ran on a platform of zero tolerance for misdemeanors. Despite this, SPD continues to be both unaccountable and largely useless. Go figure...
Maybe the process is too onerous, but if you stopped writing code altogether because of paperwork would you expect to keep your job?
There's a recent video where the police catch someone in the act of stealing a catalytic converter and let him go. In addition to the video there are multiple eye witnesses. Chesa's gone, they have allies in Breed and the new DA. What's the excuse now?
London Breed ran a representative survey by a sophisticated polling group whose objective is to identify "actions that maximize increase in votes." It's Shorism - https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/08/style/david-shor-democrat... - not specifically his group but in a Darwinian way this is how lots of local elected officials operate now.
So now we understand your question is really, "Why does this particular action affect voting?" We can only speculate. Too few people are victims of property crime for that to be the explanatory variable. I think the kind of people who are never victims of property crime (the majority) react very strongly to the presence of cameras. They also believe that Ring makes them more secure. It's all kind of stupid. But that kind of person votes.
The public having real-time access to police body cams mean that criminals also have that, which means they can see where the police are, which means they can be where the police aren't. Whereas police having real-time data means that (at least in principle) they can be where the criminals are. One of those is a sensible outcome; the other is not.
Mind you, I'm not saying this police access is a good idea. Just that this rebuttal fails.
From the article:
> The SFPD will also be able to access private camera footage during large-scale public events such as protests, even if there is no suspicion that a crime has taken place.
They explicitly want access in cases where there hasn't been a crime. The EFF posts on this legislation also points out that this is likely to not be particularly effective in addressing crime, if the rules laid out are followed. And members of the police commission even asked for this vote to be delayed. This is not actually about stopping crime.
> One of those is a sensible outcome
No, the outcome which involves all the non-criminals going about their daily lives inside a panopticon is not sensible.
I know you are making a facetious point but the footage is quite available.
If something happens there that needs to be struck from the public audit record, they should be required to get sign-off from a judge or have a watchdog official summarize the incident with the minimum possible redaction.
Cool man.
So, they basically have real-time access all the time, specifically during protests.
Keep in mind the board of supervisors is voted in by the citizens of San Francisco. This is what the citizens here want.
I used to be angry at the police for wanting such things. Then I realized that at my job I like things being efficient. Someone else has to keep the police at bay.
I also used to get mad at committees, like the board of supervisors, because they have the power to dole out power. But, like the police, what motivates them is what voters want.
That last leaves the voters. A persons position on crime really depends on how they interpret the data this dashboard: https://www.sanfranciscopolice.org/stay-safe/crime-data/crim... The citizens of San Francisco chose, based on their perception of this data, that giving more power to police surveillance was a tool they needed.
I have no solutions. Everyone will see that dashboard in a different light. Rather, the only solution I can provide is a boundary: the job of the police should be hard. If it is not, there is a hack in both your enumerated and perceived rights.
Imagine asking SF residents to tell you:
In the past 24 months, I have:
A) seen the SFPD Crime Dashboard.
B) been the victim of at least one property or violent crime and/or have witnessed a crime being committed in broad daylight.
C) read a frightening account of a nearby crime on NextDoor, Twitter or Facebook.
I think (A) would get the fewest votes. People form opinions based on their personal experience (what they see on the streets) and the narratives of others (what friends and neighbours write). Some folks look at stats. Fewer understand them. Even fewer use them to inform their opinion (rather than to support their existing opinion).
Thanks for pointing out the poor phrasing.
If the roles were reversed, eg: were this not SF, people would be die hard about the data and what it shows - which is part of my point.
We can't have our cake and eat it too. At some point you just have to set clear boundaries, like what I mentioned at the end.
Even if confronted with data, people will interpret it based on their opinion.
Crime report data is up? That could mean:
A) law enforcement has been doing a better job, so people feel it's more worthwhile to report crimes, or
B) law enforcement has been doing a worse job, so people don't bother reporting crimes
Whether someone interprets the data as meaning A or B depends on their opinion more than it informs their opinion.
I do agree that data is fallable and manipulatable, but I do still think the data is good enough for a baseline.
I'm just disagreeing that the data (trend in # of incidents of crime) are what drives most people's opinions about what policies we should pursue.
Why can't this measure just be opposed because it is oppressive and authoritarian? Why the need to emphasize "marginalized groups"? It very much reminds me of the "stop and frisk" debate that happened years ago here in New York. "Stop and frisk" was clearly an unconstitutional practice that violated 4th Amendment protections against search and seizure. Instead of opposing it on those clear grounds, "civil liberties" groups and courts focused only on the racial aspect. It was ultimately stopped not because it was unconstitutional, authoritarian overreach, but because the "impact was disparate". Why must every issue in our society be somehow shoehorned into a matter of race?
This is just plain wrong. People went after new york's stop and frisk laws for being unconstitutional. (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floyd_v._City_of_New_York)
It's not surprising that civil rights groups will focus on civil rights violations. That's not "shoehorning something into a matter of race"
When our rights are violated it's often "marginalized groups" that are disproportionately impacted because people who want to weaken our freedoms often start by attacking marginalized groups specifically because fewer people care about what happens to them and those groups often have fewer means to fight for their rights and tend to experience poorer outcomes within the legal system.
One reason why civil rights groups keep such a close eye on "marginalized groups" is that the abuses we allow to happen to them today will be the abuses we all suffer under tomorrow. Keeping an eye on how they are treated will tell us how the rest of us will be treated. Stopping those abuses before they become entrenched and normalized is critical.
It's not that nobody cares about unconstitutional practices unless they are happening to marginalized groups, but marginalized groups are where unconstitutional practices most often occur and when people fight back against them they absolutely do it because they are oppressive and authoritarian and violate everyone's rights.
If you care about your own freedoms, you should care deeply about the freedoms of everyone else, especially the most vulnerable. It's really not some conspiracy to "make everything about race".
All of that being said, the vast majority of society these days does consider it to be pretty uncool to be a huge racist, so pointing out when people are being racist does get some additional media attention to your cause, and can motivate people who don't want to be seen as enabling clearly racist practices to act against them. That does factor into things as well, although I struggle to see how that's a problem either.
Did you read your own citation?
>alleging that defendants have implemented and sanctioned a policy, practice, and/or custom of unconstitutional stops and frisks by the New York Police Department ("NYPD") on the basis of race and/or national origin
The whole suit was based on the assertion that the stops and searches were unconstitutional because they were being carried out in a racist way - not because the searches themselves were unconstitutional by their very nature.
>It's not surprising that civil rights groups will focus on civil rights violations.
I'm for for equality and equal protection under the law (notice I said equality - not equity), and I fully support groups that push for Civil Rights and equality. But who stands up for Civil Liberties? ACLU stands for American Civil Liberties Union. If they aren't willing to stand up and fight for Civil Liberties (without regard whatsoever to "marginalized" status), then who is?
>If you care about your own freedoms, you should care deeply about the freedoms of everyone else, especially the most vulnerable. It's really not some conspiracy to "make everything about race".
It isn't a conspiracy - it is right out in the open. I care about freedom as a principle without regard whatsoever to anyone's standing in society. The freedoms of the "most vulnerable" are neither more or less important than the freedom of everyone else, or the principle of freedom.
They attacked the practice on multiple grounds including Fourth Amendment grounds which I think you'll agree has nothing to do with race, so no, the whole suit was not based on the assertion that the stops and searches were unconstitutional only because they were being carried out in a racist way. The fact that the stops were racist was only one of several issues put before the courts and each of those issues were addressed by the courts on their own merits.
> But who stands up for Civil Liberties?
Many organizations, activists and individuals. It's not as if the ALCU is the only group in the country concerned with standing up for civil rights.
> If they aren't willing to stand up and fight for Civil Liberties (without regard whatsoever to "marginalized" status), then who is?
Even limiting ourselves to the ACLU, why should they have zero regard whatsoever for marginalized status? Do you think that there's some bar you have to have to clear where if your rights are violated they won't care if you aren't "marginalized" enough? Do you think that the marginalized status of a person whose rights are being violated could never be relevant as to why their rights were violated? Or that their marginalized status couldn't ever have an impact on their ability to fight against the violation of their rights without outside support? Why shouldn't they consider every factor in a case?
> I care about freedom as a principle without regard whatsoever to anyone's standing in society.
I think most members of civil rights orgs would tell you they also care about freedom as a principle which applies to everyone no matter what their standing in society.
> The freedoms of the "most vulnerable" are neither more or less important than the freedom of everyone else
I agree, but the freedoms of the "most vulnerable" are more often violated than the freedoms of everyone else, which is why they are often front and center in civil rights legislation.
Your argument, to me, sounds a bit like someone complaining that doctors and researchers focused on chickenpox put more emphasis on children than adults. "Everyone's health matters without regard whatsoever to anyone's age!" well... that isn't being contested, but it doesn't change the fact that most people who suffer from chickenpox are children and that helping children with chickenpox would also help prevent many adults from catching chickenpox or that it's the natural place for doctors and researchers to focus their efforts.
Who is going around saying that civil rights violations are acceptable when they aren't committed against someone from a marginalized group? Who is refusing to do anything about civil rights violations when they are committed against people who aren't marginalized enough?
We all agree that civil rights violations are terrible no matter who is impacted, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't fight to stop violations when marginalized groups are impacted, or that we shouldn't acknowledge the conditions that make violations against marginalized groups more prevalent or that we shouldn't acknowledge that it's often harder for marginalized groups to fight back against such abuses without lots of external support.
You seem to be railing against some kind of bias that, generally speaking, doesn't appear to exist.
There absolutely is. You can start with the deafening silence regarding the treatment the people who have been locked up for the last 2 years for being accused of trespassing in the Capitol on Jan 6th. It doesn't matter how corrupt Trump is, or how stupid his followers are, the abuses by the DOJ in these cases have been absolutely horrific. You could look at the (mostly minority) young men who are being railroaded and destroyed by Kafkaesque Title IX rules at colleges. Where are the principled stands for people who are abhorrent or distasteful, but whose rights are being violated? You think the ACLU of today would take the same, principled stand on a KKK march in Skokie, like they did in 1978? Not a chance. There has been a pronounced shift by everyone from the ACLU to the Sierra Club away from their core missions into "social justice" organizations. It is not only possible, but desirable to plainly and openly call out authoritarian overreach by the government (such as the access of these private cameras in San Fran) without shoehorning in a social justice agenda which is entirely irrelevant to the abuses in question.
You mean this silence? https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/aclu-capitol-rioters...
From what I've seen their treatment hasn't been much different from what other prisoners experience. Sadly, a certain segment of the population believes that it's preferable for prisons to be inhumane and they've been fighting against efforts to reform the prison system my whole life.
Additional context:
https://apnews.com/article/records-rebut-claims-jan-6-rioter...
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2021/10/why-investigatin...
> You could look at the (mostly minority) young men who are being railroaded and destroyed by Kafkaesque Title IX rules at colleges.
I agree that Title IX rules are a terrible problem, and that this is an area where I personally disagree with the ALCU's stance, but they haven't been ignored by civil rights groups either.
https://www.thefire.org/proposed-title-ix-regulations-would-...
> You think the ACLU of today would take the same, principled stand on a KKK march in Skokie, like they did in 1978?
I agree that the organization has changed and I personally feel that they are not as reputable as they once were, but then again, the ACLU is not the only civil rights group in the country. It's not really a problem that different groups have different focuses. Nobody complains when the NRA doesn't oppose forced labor in prisons.
Some of what you'd call "social justice" is civil rights activism. They aren't unrelated things that have to be shoehorned together. There's a lot of overlap between them. it's not an either or problem although it does sometimes provoke some interesting conflicts. The rights of minority men vs the rights of privileged women in title ix kangaroo courts for example. The winner of the Oppression Olympics in a particular case might be judged differently by different civil rights groups but I've never seen a situation where there weren't people fighting the injustices found on both sides. That's the thing to keep in mind really. People who support civil rights are all fighting for the same thing in the end, even when we're coming at the problem from different sides.
But I share your sentiment
All it can do (like I wrote, and like you wrote) is act like a deterrent, and, after the fact, when the action has already been taken, be used in follow-up activities.
Now, granted, some people walk around with a mindset of "If I can get away with it I might do it" and then a camera can be enough of a deterrent, but if we're talking about safety, we're not talking about a subset of potential bad actors.
People who are not thinking about consequences or are desperate enough to not care will not be deterred at all by a camera, and some of them might realise that if there are 10000 crimes, small crimes might get less attention than big crimes.
Cameras are mostly useful for when you want to do realtime communication, or when you want to see something after the fact. Oh, and for spying, of course, but that sits nicely under the 'realtime' umbrella.
I'm well aware of broken window fallacy and once upon a time I'd have felt like this was a violation of liberty, but it's utterly trivial to steal or carjack a car, replace or remove the license plate, commit a few other crimes (anywhere in the bay area), then dump the car - it's basically GTA out there.
You seem to be conflating two different things here. The broken window fallacy, or parable of the broken window (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window), is an idea in economics about how destructive actions don't produce a net benefit. The broken window theory (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broken_windows_theory) is an idea in criminology that small crimes, like broken windows, produce larger crimes. While there is of course debate about how accurate the latter idea is, it's not generally described as a fallacy, and its only connection to the former idea is the similar name.
2 years from now, after the real estate bubble is 30% off it's highs and all of the big companies have drastically reduced their presence their and it's clear that SF is insolvent, it is going to get apocalyptic there. And I'm not going to lie, I'm going to enjoy watching it unravel.
In short: count me skeptical that seeing crime “better” is going to change anything with such a passive police “force”.
Does anyone here know the details of how this consent works and what specific cameras are part of this program?
Personally I'm glad I gave up on living in an urban place and left for the hills last year.