SFPD obtained live access to business camera network in anticipation of protest

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/05/sfpd-obtained-live-access-business-camera-network-anticipation-tyre-nichols

by jaredwiener • 3 years ago

147 126 3 years ago

eff.org

sidewndr463• 3 years ago

Any complaints should be directed at the oversight board that granted an ordinance allowing this.

Police men are logically expected to use the tools given them to do their job most effectively.

nyc_data_geek13• 3 years ago

The job of police is not to monitor and suppress constitutionally protected rights, such as those to free public expression, gathering and protest.

sidewndr463• 3 years ago

The police are agents of the government. Police pretty obviously are there to protect the government from the citizens. Not the other way around.

aftbit• 3 years ago

While I wholeheartedly agree, this is a very modern and localized viewpoint. In most places and times, the job of the police was exactly to protect the ruling classes from uprising by the underclasses. For historical reasons if nothing else, protests make them very nervous.

If you doubt this... then just read some history of labor rights in the world. Absolutely horrifying things were done by the law in the name of suppressing unionization all around the US and abroad.

Plus, some protests turn ugly. We saw this in Seattle and elsewhere during the BLM protests. Some protestors engage in property crimes and violence, granting an air of legitimacy to a strong police response.

chatmasta• 3 years ago

I agree with you, but this is a weak argument, because the police aren't suppressing any right of expression by monitoring protests. They may be having a chilling effect by effectively discouraging protesters to attend, but they are not actively suppressing any identifiable freedoms.

diebeforei485• 3 years ago

It is their job to (1) protect the protestors from physical harm, and (2) to prevent the protests from getting out of hand like what happened in June 2020.

titzer2• 3 years ago

There was a time when citizens had some civic awareness and would push back against things that are obvious violations of constitutional rights. But that time has passed; now everybody's "just doing their job". Uh huh. "Just following orders." Which, incidentally, is not a defense.

perihelions• 3 years ago

- "The SFPD was able to seek live monitoring as a result of the controversial September 2022 temporary ordinance that authorized police to receive live access to non-city security cameras for a host of reasons, including to monitor so-called “significant events.” This temporary camera ordinance, which passed as a 15-month pilot, was vigorously opposed by community and civil liberties organizations, including EFF..."

Discussed at the time,

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32954926 ("San Francisco police can now watch private surveillance cameras in real time", 170 comments)

jeffbee2• 3 years ago

Someone make a convincing case that I should be concerned about this.

titzer2• 3 years ago

Oh, don't be. It's not your rights they're after, just catching double-plus-ungood guys...you know PEDOPHILES and CHILD PORNO and SOMETHING ELSE SCARY.

jeffbee2• 3 years ago

That’s exactly the type of thinking that led me to cancel my EFF support years ago.

EA-316710• 3 years ago

I always ask this, I've been around for decades of pearl clutching and doomsaying, and the dystopia never arrives. "This technology could be used to blah blah blah," but is it actually used that way?

No one ever seems to have information about non-hypotheticals and I'm tired of slippery slope hysteria.

mschuster916• 3 years ago

"This technology could be used to blah blah blah," but is it actually used that way?

For one, you're falling towards the "preparedness paradoxon".

But much worse: Yes, we absolutely have examples in the real world just how fucked up surveillance can get. The GDR's Stasi for example tracked people, just using people instead of technology, to an insane degree. Erich Mielke would openly drool in his grave if he knew just how powerful technology has become. In recent times, look at China and their "social credit" score.

Don't believe for a single second the US is unable to sink that low. Even decades-old stuff believed to be safe can be struck down with the stroke of a pen of the Supreme Court. Get your expectations codified in a constitutional amendment, or be prepared to literally have to fight for your expectations. Abortion was just the beginning.

banannaise3• 3 years ago

...wait, you don't think police departments currently go after dissidents by looking for anything they can charge them for, or that surveillance technology allows them to do this more easily?

AnimalMuppet2• 3 years ago

Hmm. I seem to recall discussion here on HN, just yesterday, about the FBI misusing their surveillance power 280,000 times in a year. Is that enough non-hypothetical for you?

BryantD2• 3 years ago

This may or may not qualify for you: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/new-report-shows-departm...

Here’s why it counts for me. It’s not scary new tech, but it is a case that shows that police departments will be as aggressive as possible about collecting data.

This isn’t “cops are bad.” Most of us would do the same thing, as evidenced by the endless thirst for data that most tech companies have. When there’s a way to learn more about something, humans tend to lean into it rather than worrying about inchoate potential misuse.

salawat• 3 years ago

It never comes because we fight it. If you stop fighting it, and let it gain ground, it is an inevitability. There is a reason why back in Lincoln's day, the preservation of Liberties for fiture generations was extolled to a near religious degree. The transfer of fewer liberties between generations is hard to notice, as the incoming generation is removed from the state where the apparatus was not around.

This is why Jefferson wanted sunset dates on everything, so every group would have to fully come to grips with why things are the way they are instead of going with Madison's view of a state of affairs where "deference to the dead" was the norm and an eventual State where all the laws in existence were handed down or made on the basis of the lives of people who are long dead.

Governments should serve the living. Not the dead. Governing is hard. Anyone who jumps into it thinking otherwise is a fool.

kevviiinn• 3 years ago

The dystopia already exists, you just happen to be one of the lucky ones that it isn't impacting as much

ROTMetro2• 3 years ago

I'm not doing research for someone as disingenuous as you (sorry I don't have a canned response file for reference on Government overreach/abuses) but this was a discussion on this website just yesterday:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36041059

I'm pretty sure since you made your way to Hacker New you can also Google the relevant information you are asking other who came to a random article to somehow have already compiled for you.

kornhole2• 3 years ago

These incremental steps are imperceptible by design. We already live in a dystopia, but most do not perceive what is happening on many fronts.

mschuster916• 3 years ago

In Germany it has been the rule for years - first implicitly in the Volkszählungsurteil from 1983 [1], then explicitly [2] - that indiscriminate camera surveillance of demonstrations or police controls that register names creates a "chilling effect" on the right of people to free assembly.

The "convincing case" is China's "social credit" system and the numerous abuses of subpoenas for dragnet surveillance in the US. In Germany, back from the IP address collection debate over a decade ago, we have the saying "Wo ein Trog ist kommen die Schweine" [3] - where there's a feeding trough, pigs will come on their own.

[1] https://taz.de/Ueberwachung-auf-Demonstrationen/!5167172/

[2] https://www.juraforum.de/news/ovg-muenster-fordert-waehrend-...

[3] https://www.zeit.de/digital/datenschutz/2009-12/vds-bverfg-k...

deet• 3 years ago

A convincing case against this probably can't be made.

But that's the problem. Each incremental step towards more surveillance, less privacy, and more potential for government abuse is perfectly justifiable and seems reasonable.

But then temporary turns to permanent. And the "significant events" restriction gets dropped. And 450 cameras from local businesses turn into thousands from others, or Rings, or Teslas, or whatever.

And then manual monitoring by humans turns into AI-powered monitoring. And the looking at cameras gets combined with location data.

The point is, each step is reasonable. But who knows where it goes? We have no idea, nor do we have any idea who will be on the other side watching or what their agenda will be in 5 years, 20 years, or 100 years.

So it's important to stay vigilant of any incremental privacy incursion or expansion of government power. It doesn't mean saying No necessarily, but being aware and cautious.

diydsp• 3 years ago

Something you did in the last month becomes socially unacceptable and a demagogue inspires their followers to hunt your family down.

nonrepeating• 3 years ago

This kind of thing has to be fought at the highest level, specifically, overturning (or otherwise neutralizing) Smith v. Maryland. That ruling began the greatest assault on the Fourth Amendment since the Civil War. Also, Maryland v. King. (What is it with Maryland, anyway?)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smith_v._Maryland

Apologies to non-American readers, and acknowledgement that the US is not the whole world.

JamesLeonis• 3 years ago

"San Franciscans spend more and get less from their police department than most major California cities" [0]

From the report:

[SFPD have] by far the highest costs per square mile patrolled of California’s six major-city police departments (Table 2). Meanwhile, the SFPD has the lowest rate and biggest decline in arrests per reported crime and crimes solved by police over the 2010-2020 decade, even as reported Part I felony offense rates rose (up 19%).
The SFPD’s low rate of clearing violent crimes compared to other police departments is especially worrisome. San Francisco’s reported rate of Part I “index” offenses (the four violent and three property felonies used as a standard measure of crime) is by far the highest of any major California city, yet SFPD arrests have dropped 41 percent by number and 60 percent per reported offense during this period. That crime rose and arrests fell while the SFPD’s budget and staffing expanded challenges conventional beliefs that more police mitigate crime.

[0] https://www.cjcj.org/media/import/documents/san_franciscans_...

ncr100• 3 years ago

Is that the reason why the SFPD needs access to the business camera network?

Or does the SFPD need access to it because it is otherwise restricted from performing conventional policing acts?

I thought that I heard political rhetoric, while living in SF for 20 years, about how the SFPD also is hamstrung, limited by local laws which prevent them from chasing certain suspects because they have a higher standard of that the alleged incident needs to meet before they can engage.

It's not as simple as, "pay money get peace." At least that's what I observed.

ok_dad5• 3 years ago

Cops will always complain about constraints on their policing and investigations, but those constraints are there in order to protect people's rights in the eyes of the law. I can't say for certain every single rule or law constraining cops are good or helpful to that goal, but based on my experiences with humans in the past, I don't trust very powerful authority figures that say they just need a little bit more power to do their jobs effectively. I think that quickly turns into corruption.

omegaworks3• 3 years ago

SFPD blew up a bomb in front of the mayor's office in 1975 in order to assert their dominance over the democratically elected government of San Francisco.

They exist only for themselves and their masters: the landed gentry of the city.

mike_d3• 3 years ago

Meanwhile, the SFPD has the lowest rate and biggest decline in arrests per reported crime

SFPD (as well as other Bay Area law enforcement agencies) are hamstrung by the judicial system. From policies that effectively eliminate accountability (thefts below a dollar amount, individuals below an age, etc) to DAs cutting people loose as soon as they are booked so they never even see a day in court.

Think of it this way: If you are a QA engineer working on a video game, and week after week 100% of your bugs get closed as WONTFIX. Are you going to continue finding 10 bugs a day, or will maybe 2 a day get you by?

To be perfectly clear... I believe policing should be hard work. From an investigative perspective they should have to put in the hours and not just get a surveillance state handed to them. But I also recognize that once a potential perpetrator is located, we give them no good options for how to proceed and make our community safer.

renewiltord• 3 years ago

Interestingly, the previous DA was recalled and a pro-police DA was elected. The previous DA was in charge till Jul 2022. Here are the crime dashboards: https://www.sanfranciscopolice.org/stay-safe/crime-data/crim...

One way to measure the success of this is to provide a bedding-in period to give the new DA a chance to settle her office and hire people, etc. and then compare.

The UI there lets you select the period from Jan 1 to May 21 and compare year on year. This lets you see the change in crime. Given that the hypothesis is that DAs that cut people loose significantly affects crime, we can get some evidence for this by looking at that period against the previous year (thereby getting rid of seasonal effects like crime being higher in some months).

We can get an idea of how much of the variation is natural by looking at that period for the last two years, since the previous DA was in charge from Jan 2020 to Jul 2022. I won't repeat the numbers here since the UI makes this really easy.

Eager to hear about anyone else who would like this form of hypothesis-examine loop and what other testable hypotheses they can put forth.

mrguyorama5• 3 years ago

SF got their new DA, where is the reduction in crime? Or maybe that was never the problem and police just don't do their damn job, because as we see all over the country, there is no legal obligation to do their job, and you basically have to try to get fired.

banannaise3• 3 years ago

Low-level thefts are not counted in this statistic. Read the post you are replying to again (emphasis mine).

The SFPD’s low rate of clearing violent crimes compared to other police departments is especially worrisome. San Francisco’s reported rate of Part I “index” offenses (the four violent and three property felonies used as a standard measure of crime) is by far the highest of any major California city, yet SFPD arrests have dropped 41 percent by number and 60 percent per reported offense during this period.

As to the rest of your point: if the judicial system says "we're only going to prosecute violent crime" then wouldn't the logical reaction be to... focus on violent crime? Why bang your head against the wall of low-level theft, if not for the explicit purpose of overriding the judicial system, which is 100% not the job of the police?

s1artibartfast• 3 years ago

Worth noting the definition of Part I felony “index” offenses: murder, rape, aggravated assault, robbery, burglary, larceny-theft, and motor vehicle theft.

The offenses reported are up 28% in 10 years, and case clearance is down -33%

cameldrv• 3 years ago

A lot of the problem here goes back to housing costs. Hiring police is extremely expensive, but even at their high salaries, SF can't fill its hiring quota. That also means that they're forced to hire marginal officers that they'd otherwise pass on in a competitive hiring environment.

The biggest reason that they can't hire is that the house you can buy in SF on even a high police officer's salary is much worse than what you can get elsewhere. Due to geography, it's also hard to even commute from a much lower cost area.

If the Bay Area simply built more housing, so many of these problems would be reduced.

motohagiography• 3 years ago

I'd rather know how the Union Square Business Improvement District’s (USBID) camera network operates as a single service with people monitoring it, where they can just hand over access to police. These para-municipal agencies seem pretty dystopian.

The problem with this stuff is that it cuts both ways. You think you are protected by these surveillance schemes, but then your local government starts tolerating petty crimes like vandalism, auto theft, vagrancy, and shoplifting because it centralizes their role in "managing" (read: extracting value from) it, offering protection to favoured constituencies in exchange for support, and then when you want to shovel a tent off your property, paint over grafitti, or discourage a shoplifter, those cameras neutralize you because you can't take the risk of being charged because you actually have something to lose. Cameras don't stop criminals, they just neutralize law abiding residents from discouraging threats to themselves and their community.

flangola7• 3 years ago

Those do sound like things we should discourage. We didn't protest and disrupt police "sweeps" to just let business owners go and do it. Capital always gets the benefit of the doubt from the law, if they're worried about being charged with something, they're doing something wrong.

alephnerd5• 3 years ago

I used to live on the border between USBID and Lower Nob Hill.

On the side of the alley within the USBID the streets would be cleaned of litter, poop would be washed, and private security (off duty SFPD hired by the USBID) would monitor the neighborhood.

On the side of the alley that wasn't within the USBID, trash would be dropped, you would see open PCP and Meth use, and poop on the street, and cops wouldn't respond unless a weapon was drawn.

The distance between the two was 5-7 feet. The area within the USBID didn't change drastically compared to pre-pandemic, but the area outside the USBID basically collapsed.

There are a lot of these invisible borders across San Francisco which townies and unhoused people can recognize.

banannaise3• 3 years ago

So instead of solving problems, they move the problems somewhere else. That seems like not a good solution? You can't just make the whole world a business improvement district.

klyrs• 3 years ago

off duty SFPD hired by the USBID

Sounds like a perverse incentive to me

_hhkc• 3 years ago

There are many organizations like this sprouting up around the city. Businesses and neighbors attempting to collectively do the work that the city departments aren't doing.

tlogan• 3 years ago

I do no know if this is going to help or not. What is point of these cameras if they are not going catch the criminals?

Eye glasses store I go to just got burglarized: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bcWfJijiLkU

In the middle of the day. Everything recorded but nothing.

tristor• 3 years ago

In the middle of the day. Everything recorded but nothing.

It's happening all over SF and several other major cities, but SF particularly. And it seems like nobody is interested in doing anything to stop it. It's truly ridiculous and it represents a complete breakdown of social mores.

mrguyorama5• 3 years ago

The DA was replaced with someone vocally pro-police. How come we haven't seen a reduction in crime?

inconceivable• 3 years ago

in latin america the guards just stand outside with shotguns. it can get that bad.

ummonk• 3 years ago

Given the amount of opportunistic looting of shopping districts that has often used such protests as cover in the past, it's good that they were proactive about this, in case it happened again.

chrsjxn2• 3 years ago

SFPD had a 6% clearance rate for all property crimes in 2020, with reports that it got lower since [1].

There are a lot of anecdotes, occasionally newsworthy, about SFPD watching theft happen and doing nothing about it [2]. SFPD also appears to have refused to assist the DA in arrests related to theft rings for political reasons [3].

It's noteworthy that SFPD chose to pursue such broad surveillance access for a protest of police violence. Their past record on theft and vandalism is an exceptionally flimsy justification.

[1] https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/The-state-of-the-SFPD... [2]: https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/San-Francisco-po... [3]: https://sfist.com/2022/05/23/report-sfpd-refused-to-particip...

shuckles6• 3 years ago

SFPD’s staffing levels are also at historic lows (and much lower than UN averages) while the work required to investigate and prosecute crimes has increased due to the professionalization of policing (a lot more TPS reports but also valuable constraints on autonomy). Perceived aggregate activity being down isn’t particularly surprising.

The U-Haul stunt was largely just a stunt. It was later revealed the DA’s office just didn’t get their paperwork right to organize evidence transport.

thelock85• 3 years ago

My friend and I often talk about the analogous situations between police officers and teachers in urban centers.

Both really hard jobs that suffer with retention and recruitment. Both fraught with union agreements that make it really difficult to fire bad actors.

But where the analogy breaks down is around funding vs performance & accountability. Poor crime stats are usually followed by a conversation around policies and lack of funds that hamper police activity, whereas poor test scores are usually followed by school closures, reduced salary negotiations, and state/federal oversight.

It’s interesting that educators always get the blame and providing more resources is met with some version of “we already spend more than X”. But police often get sympathy and no push back for more resources even though US LEO get more funding than any other country and spends a greater % of GDP than most countries. (even in the face of massive police reform protests over the past decade).

I hold the opinion that education produces greater positive network effects on society than incarceration does, so this disconnect is really mind-boggling.

verall• 3 years ago

Both fraught with union agreements that make it really difficult to fire bad actors.

In many states teachers are not allowed to bargain collectively and the unions have no power to prevent anyone's firing, and these states do not have better education outcomes, so I think for education at least we have to rule out the unions.

rahimnathwani• 3 years ago

"whereas poor test scores are usually followed by school closures, reduced salary negotiations, and state/federal oversight"

Not in San Francisco.

Whenever SF public schooling comes up in a f2f conversation, I ask people how much they think SFUSD spends per student per year.

People's estimates are usually 1/3 to 1/2 of the actual figure: $22k per year.

$1.1bn/year for ~50k students. About half of them can read+write at grade level. Same for math.

shuckles6• 3 years ago

Police funding is far more suspect to politics than school funding, which is usually set by a state-level formula. Voter support for school bond measures and the like is probably higher at a baseline than police or public safety measures.

shuckles6• 3 years ago

Thinking about this more: the reason you might have this impression is that police funding cuts are actually discussed a lot more than school cuts. The Seattle city council actually voted 7-2 during peak BLM to cut the police budget in half before their voters forced them to walk it back in outrage. Imagine a big city politician seriously entertaining cutting the school budget in half. It’d never happen.

tempfortwitt904• 3 years ago

In 2020, I was in a parking lot in an SF Bay Area suburb. A guy parked his car in front of a store, and within 2 minutes the car was swarmed by 3 local police cars, gun drawn. The owner went back out to the car reluctantly.

Turned out the plates were reported stolen, by clerical mistake (typo?) and the towns license plate scanners picked up the car when he got off the freeway. The parking lot we were located in was two stoplights from the highway, and took about 3 minutes to travel. They picked him up that fast and basically drove around til they found the car (assuming off a picture/video feed since stolen plates won't be on a car that matches the original cars description).

That's when I knew we were definitely in a tracking nightmare most people don't even know about.

brickfaced2• 3 years ago

I suppose it's only a tracking nightmare unless and until you're the victim of grand theft auto, or specific and tangible police abuse of this power.

lesuorac3• 3 years ago

I believe you're looking at the situation incorrectly.

An unoccupied car doesn't need to be swarmed with firearms. It's a car; its not going to shoot you. Its not great that the car was misidentified but the response by the police wasn't appropriate even if it was identified correctly.

Tracking nightmare is not the real problem; it's the abuse of power.

tempfortwitt904• 3 years ago

Odds of having my car stolen feel a lot lower than the odds of my life being affected negatively by the government currently.

I have cars that I accept I can just lose. And the one that's so expensive I can't, I have insurance. I have little insurance against getting screwed by the government if I happen to be that unlucky. Just a general feeling, idk if rational or not.

AnishLaddha3• 3 years ago

how about before doing that, sfpd starts doing basic stuff like foot patrols in targeted neighborhoods, dealer arrests, and bait cars? start working with primitive tools and then gain access to more advanced ones as you reach bottlenecks.

SFPD obtained live access to business camera network in anticipation of protest

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