sfpd – Techdirt (original) (raw)

To The Surprise Of Absolutely No One, Cops Under Facial Recognition Bans Are Asking Other Agencies To Run Searches For Them

from the law-fought-the-law-and-the-law-lost dept

God forbid any of you peons break a law. It doesn’t matter if you only do it once. If you get caught, it’s all on you.

But if you’re a cop, laws are, at best, suggestions. Break them if you can. Ignore them when they’re inconvenient. And treat any law or court ruling that reins in officers (and/or protects constitutional rights) as optional unless there’s no way through it but to respect it.

Cops dodge warrant requirements for cell phone location data by buying data directly from third-party data brokers. Cops avoid local laws limiting civil asset forfeiture by asking the feds to “adopt” their latest stash of ill-gotten booty, allowing themselves to benefit directly from seizures otherwise restricted in their locales.

And, now that they’re subject to facial recognition tech bans in several places around the nation, they’re ignoring those laws too. Douglas MacMillan has the details for the Washington Post.

Officers in Austin and San Francisco — two of the largest cities where police are banned from using the technology — have repeatedly asked police in neighboring towns to run photos of criminal suspects through their facial recognition programs, according to a Washington Post review of police documents.

In San Francisco, the workaround didn’t appear to help. Since the city’s ban took effect in 2019, the San Francisco Police Department has asked outside agencies to conduct at least five facial recognition searches, but no matches were returned, according to a summary of those incidents submitted by the department to the county’s board of supervisors last year.

[…]

Austin police officers have received the results of at least 13 face searches from a neighboring police department since the city’s 2020 ban — and have appeared to get hits on some of them, according to documents obtained by The Post through public records requests and sources who shared them on the condition of anonymity.

By definition, these are isolated incidents. Roughly 99.9% of the nation is free of any facial recognition tech bans. And the number of violations reported here appear (that’s a very key word) to be extremely low given the number of theoretical opportunities available to law enforcement officers to break the law.

But let’s not pretend that means it’s ok. Any violation of the law is a violation of the law. No one’s letting you out of a speeding ticket because you generally follow the speed limit. And no court is just going to dismiss charges because it’s the only time you’ve ever murdered anyone.

True, violating facial recognition bans isn’t on par with murder. But it is on par with, at the very least, traffic violations. If we don’t get a free pass when we’ve been caught speeding, cops shouldn’t be given a free pass on facial recognition ban violations just because they haven’t violated the bans thousands of times.

The SFPD spokesperson confirmed no investigations were opened or officers disciplined for violating the ban by asking outside agencies to run searches for it. The same thing goes for the Austin PD, which only admitted the unlawful searches had been requested after being contacted by the Washington Post. It said vague things about an investigation, but the spokesperson said nothing that suggested people would be punished or steps would be taken to prevent further lawbreaking by the PD’s law enforcers.

But here’s the real heart of the issue: what’s reported here is most likely an undercount. These violations are likely occurring far more frequently. As the article points out, law enforcement agencies rarely like to discuss use of this tech, even when presenting evidence in court. What’s leaked out into the public domain via public records requests is most likely just the tip of the iceberg.

[E]nforcing these bans is difficult, experts said, because authorities often conceal their use of facial recognition. Even in places with no restrictions on the technology, investigators rarely mention its use in police reports. And, because facial recognition searches are not presented as evidence in court — legal authorities claim this information is treated as an investigative lead, not as proof of guilt — prosecutors in most places are not required to tell criminal defendants they were identified using an algorithm, according to interviews with defense lawyers, prosecutors and judges.

“Police are using it but not saying they are using it,” said Chesa Boudin, San Francisco’s former district attorney, who said he was wary of prosecuting cases that may have relied on information the SFPD obtained in violation of the city’s ban.

Even if we take the numbers at face value, it’s still a problem. And it’s one that has existed as long as law enforcement agencies have existed. To law enforcers, laws are for other people. When they break them, it’s because they’re pursuing loftier goals, like public safety. When normal people do it, they’re just criminals. And because they’re criminals, every violation should be handled harshly. When cops do it, everyone is just expected to shrug it off as the cost of doing public safety business.

But we shouldn’t accept this, not even in limited quantities. And the cities and states that have passed these bans need to be right on top of this, demanding accountability and transparency from the law enforcement agencies they oversee. If they’re assuming cops won’t break laws they don’t like, they’re stupider than the cops they’re overseeing and twice as stupid as cops think their overseers are. If you can’t keep this from happening, why even bother passing laws?

Filed Under: austin d, facial recognition, facial recognition ban, police, sfpd

San Francisco Bets Big On Surveillance, Blankets City With 400 Automatic License Plate Readers

from the New-London,-California dept

There’s nothing more urbane than omnipresent surveillance, apparently. London is considered one of the classiest places on earth, what with its wealth of history, iconic landmarks, and… thousands and thousands of surveillance cameras. It’s also home to knife crime, pervasive racism, and soccer hooligans, with plenty of residents exhibiting all three of these traits simultaneously.

San Francisco apparently feels it should be the London of the West. Or at least the West Coast, seeing as New York City has been vying with London for the title of “Most Surveillance Cameras Per Capita” for years now.

The latest addition to San Francisco’s surveillance armada is hundreds of automatic license plate readers provided by yet another controversial surveillance tech company.

San Francisco police will soon have access to a network of 400 license plate cameras scattered throughout the city.

On Thursday, Mayor London Breed signed the legislation allowing SFPD to begin installing the Flock Safety camera system, seen here in a company video posted to social media.

Chief Bill Scott said the cameras will help track down criminals.

“70% of crimes nationally are committed using vehicles or have vehicles involved in those crimes,” said Scott. “So, that should tell you how important this type of technology is. Because, it’s not limited to organized retail theft. It’s violent crime, it’s other types of crimes.”

Sure, there’s some truth to this statement. A bus or an Uber is not a reliable getaway car. But does that justify setting up 400 cameras in San Francisco capable of creating a pretty comprehensive map of residents’ movements?

Then there’s the vendor. Flock has been a bit problematic ever since its inception. Its first customers were gated communities and homeowners’ associations who felt they needed to be able to keep an eye on every car traveling in and out of “their” neighborhoods.

Since then, Flock has aggressively courted law enforcement agencies, hoping to become another consumer brand with a lot of cops on board, much like Amazon’s Ring doorbell cameras. The thing about shifting focus from high-end neighborhoods to striking massive deals with cop shops is that nothing much changes when it comes to who’s being targeted.

HOAs and gated communities love to keep unwanted people out. Law enforcement agencies deploy ALPRs to target cities’ least desirable residents. You can add tech to the cop, but you can’t take the inherent bias out of the business of policing.

Take Tulsa’s police force, which recently bought a flock of cameras after a one-year trial. Comparing the map of camera placement with a map of the racial makeup of the city shows cameras are placed exclusively in majority Black and Hispanic neighborhoods with none in the wealthy and white midtown neighborhoods. This creates a cycle in which more surveillance in Black and Brown neighborhoods leads to more reports of crime and therefore continuous justification of camera usage.

That’s the same law enforcement agency that’s apparently letting Flock Safety write its press releases for it. Flock’s PR wing is more than happy to produce statements for law enforcement and provides it public sector customers with “Public Information Officer Toolkits” that contain boilerplate for press releases that ensure Flock is credited for its important contribution to public safety. Local news agencies often publish these statements with few alterations, turning their publications into extensions of Flock’s marketing wing.

San Francisco’s police chief claims this rollout won’t create a “surveillance state.” (His exact words, btw.) But those erecting surveillance states rarely consider what they’re doing to be the creation of surveillance state. And even if they do see the surveillance state aspects, the last thing they’ll do is acknowledge this publicly.

Meanwhile, there’s hardly any evidence a massive network of ALPR cameras will do much more than allow law enforcement agencies to maintain a massive database of people’s movements.

Oakland police have had automated license plate readers on 36 patrol cars since 2008 and acknowledged that they got no investigative leads from the license plate readers in 2022, according to the most recent annual report. In that same time period, 34 stolen cars were recovered but no arrests were made.

[…]

BART launched a pilot program of license plate readers – 7 mobile and 2 fixed – at the MacArthur BART parking garage in May. The goal was to catch people breaking into cars and stealing catalytic converters. To date, no arrests have been made. However, BART noted in its annual report that 288 parking citations have been handed out during the pilot phase.

[…]

In response to a public records request, Tiburon said it had no records to disclose regarding arrests or costs relating to its automated license plate readers. However, Tiburon did provide numbers of cars recovered since 2010, when the town installed the cameras: 57 cars were recovered in 13 years – roughly four cars were recovered annually.

Is that sort of success really worth shelling out 2,500−3,000acamera,plusthousandsofdollarsin“maintenance”fees?It’snotlikeit’scheap.Piedmont,California—anaffluentcitywithonly11,000residents—ispaying2,500-3,000 a camera, plus thousands of dollars in “maintenance” fees? It’s not like it’s cheap. Piedmont, California — an affluent city with only 11,000 residents — is paying 2,500−3,000acamera,plusthousandsofdollarsin“maintenance”fees?It’snotlikeit’scheap.Piedmont,California—anaffluentcitywithonly11,000residents—ispaying100,000 in maintenance fees annually to service 39 cameras. The network being set up in San Francisco is ten times that size, which means it likely will be paying at least $1 million a year to Flock just to keep its ALPR network active.

This ALPR network isn’t going to solve San Francisco’s crime problem. While it may score the occasional win, about the only thing residents are guaranteed is that their plate/location records will be stored for extended periods of time and accessed improperly by officers because that’s just what they do when they have access to people’s personal data. And when it fails to do the job the city is paying it to do, it will just move on to the next advancement in surveillance tech, having learned nothing from this experience.

Filed Under: 4th amendment, alpr, license plate readers, license plates, london breed, san francisco, sfpd, surveillance

San Francisco Legislators Greenlight Killing Of Residents By Police Robots… And Then Kill It…

from the Robocop-is-not-something-to-aspire-to dept

Update: So we had this post about SF supervisors approving the killer robots in their initial vote, and had a note at the end that it still needed one more round of approvals by the Supervisors… and apparently widespread protests last night convinced the board to drop the proposal! The original (mostly obsolete) post is below.

For a while, the city of San Francisco appeared to be on the cutting edge of civil rights. It responded to the exponential growth of the facial recognition tech industry by banning use of the unproven, often-biased tech by government agencies, including the San Francisco Police Department.

This progressive take on policing was short-lived. The 2019 ban is no longer making headlines. Instead, a move towards a West Coast police state dominates reporting about the city and its legislators, who have apparently decided that because crime exists, freedoms and liberties need to be back-burnered for the time being.

The first indication that things were sliding extremely off the rails in San Francisco was the city’s decision to give the SFPD on-demand access to live feeds from privately owned security cameras. This intrusion on personal property was justified by a blog post from Mayor London Breed, who claimed it only made since because crimes were still happening. Apparently, “exigent circumstances” were no longer enough. To “protect public safety responsibly,” San Francisco cops needed to be able to ride piggyback on private feeds whenever they deemed it necessary to do so.

Because that just wasn’t totalitarian enough, city legislators proposed another increase in police powers. Killer robots, they said, seemingly unaware of the public’s everlasting opposition to government-deployed automatons armed with deadly weapons. Literally every dystopian bit of popular culture says this is a bad idea.

Everyone else is wrong, said legislators. Let the processor chips fall where they may. And now the proposal was approved, as the Associated Press reports.

Supervisors in San Francisco voted Tuesday to give city police the ability to use potentially lethal, remote-controlled robots in emergency situations — following an emotionally charged debate that reflected divisions on the politically liberal board over support for law enforcement.

The vote was 8-3, with the majority agreeing to grant police the option despite strong objections from civil liberties and other police oversight groups.

Those aligning themselves with Terminators 0-1000 had their excuses.

Supervisor Connie Chan, a member of the committee that forwarded the proposal to the full board, said she understood concerns over use of force but that “according to state law, we are required to approve the use of these equipments. So here we are, and it’s definitely not a easy discussion.”

Wait a minute. State law says city supervisors must approve non-human deployment of deadly force? That seems… well, incredibly unlikely. This sounds like someone trying to wash their hands of the whole issue, but with the blood of city residents rather than anything that would actually make their hands less dirty.

The SFPD also “understands” the concerns of citizens. And it promises residents will not be shot to death by its city-approved killer robots. They’ll only be blown the fuck up.

The San Francisco Police Department said it does not have pre-armed robots and has no plans to arm robots with guns. But the department could deploy robots equipped with explosive charges “to contact, incapacitate, or disorient violent, armed, or dangerous suspect” when lives are at stake, SFPD spokesperson Allison Maxie said in a statement.

Huh. It looks like the SFPD misspelled “kill” at least three times in its statement. I’m not sure how you “contact” someone with an explosive, but when the Unabomber did it, it was a federal crime. “Incapacitate” is just another way to pronounce “kill.” And “disorient” only makes sense if it means the explosives will make someone incapable of orienting themselves… you know, like when they’re reduced to chunks of flesh that require a mop-up team using actual mops.

This is supposed to make people feel better about allowing armed killers with zero calculable feelings to roll up on crime scenes with a metal fistful of C-4.

Supervisors amended the proposal Tuesday to specify that officers could use robots only after using alternative force or de-escalation tactics, or concluding they would not be able to subdue the suspect through those alternative means. Only a limited number of high-ranking officers could authorize use of robots as a deadly force option.

Oh. OK. So the “amendment” shifts almost everything to the discretion of officers who will always claim they tried to de-escalate the hell out of the scene and got the shift commander on the horn before sending in a deadly blend of CPUs and explosives to “subdue” the suspect into a bloody paste incapable of alleging civil rights violations. If it’s found none of the things cops asserted prior to disintegrating a suspect are true, they’ll still be able to ask for immunity. At worst, they’ll be indemnified by the city — the same city that said killer robots are definitely something that’s needed as the city (despite some recent spikes in certain crime) enjoys historical lows in crime rates.

Here’s the thing: if you don’t want cops to get in trouble by deploying new deadly force methods without clear justification, the best thing you can do is NOT GIVE THEM THAT OPTION. Allowing cops to use remote-controlled bombs to, um, defuse situations will only result in a whole lot of post-facto forgiveness requests — pleas for mercy after they’ve already rendered someone incapable of being identified by their loved ones. There’s no way any police department in the nation can say it’s earned the trust to use something like this responsibly. Until officers can stop murdering people on the regular, the last thing they should be given access to is more ways to kill.

That said, this proposal isn’t the law just yet. The Supervisors need to vote on this again before it heads to Mayor Breed’s desk for signature.

Filed Under: autonomous killing, london breed, police robots, san francisco, sfpd

San Francisco Lawmakers Think It Might Be OK For Cops To Deploy Robots To Kill People

from the [extremely-Jim-Morrison-voice]-there's-a-killer-at-the-door dept

Lots of people like to pretend California is home to certifiable Communists — a socialist collective masquerading as a state. But California is not beholden to socialist ideals. It has its own dictatorial ideological bent, one that’s only slightly tamed by its election of liberal leaders.

Every move towards the left is greeted by an offset to the right. If anything, California is the Land of Compromise. Ideological shifts are short-lived. What really lasts are the things the California government does that give the government more power, even as they ensure the electorate that their concerns have been heard.

Case in point: San Francisco. In early 2019, the city passed a ban on facial recognition tech use by government agencies. This move placed it on the “left,” at least in terms of policing the police. (The law was amended shortly thereafter when it became clear government employees were unable to validate their identity on city-issued devices.)

Communist paradise indeed. But no, not really. San Francisco’s lawmakers may have had some good ideas about trimming the government’s surveillance powers, but those good ideas were soon compromised by law enforcement. And those compromises have been greeted with silence.

In May of this year, cops were caught accessing autonomous vehicle data in the hopes of obtaining evidence in ongoing investigations. A truly autonomous vehicle creates nothing but third-party data, so there was little need to worry about Fourth Amendment implications. But still it seems a city concerned with government overreach would express a little more concern about this cop opportunism.

Nothing happened in response to this revelation. Instead, four months later, city lawmakers approved on-demand access to private security cameras, reasoning that cops deserved this access because crime was still a thing. Mayor London Breed justified the move towards increased authoritarianism in a [checks notes] Medium post:

We also need to make sure our police officers have the proper tools to protect public safety responsibly. The police right now are barred from accessing or monitoring live video unless there are “exigent circumstances”, which are defined as events that involve an imminent danger of serious physical injury or death. If this high standard is not met, the Police can’t use live video feed, leaving our neighborhoods and retailers vulnerable.

These are the reasons why I authored this legislation. It will authorize police to use non-City cameras and camera networks to temporarily live monitor activity during significant events with public safety concerns, investigations relating to active misdemeanor and felony violations, and investigations into officer misconduct.

When the going gets tough, the elected toughs get chickenshit. All it took to generate carte blanche access to private security cameras was some blips on the crime radar. Whatever gains were made with the facial recognition tech ban were undone by the city’s unwillingness to stand by its principles when isolated incidents (hyped into absurdity by news broadcasters) made certain residents feel ways about stuff.

The news cycle may have cycled, but the desire to subject San Francisco to extensive government intrusion remains. If the cops can’t have facial recognition tech, maybe they should be allowed to kill people by proxy. It’s a super-weird take on law enforcement, but one that has been embraced by apparently super-weird city legislators, as Will Jarrett reports for Mission Local.

A policy proposal heading for Board of Supervisors approval next week would explicitly authorize San Francisco police to kill suspects using robots.

The new policy, which defines how the SFPD is allowed to use its military-style weapons, was put together by the police department. Over the past several weeks, it has been scrutinized by supervisors Aaron Peskin, Rafael Mandelman and Connie Chan, who together comprise the Board of Supervisors Rules Committee.

Yikes. Turning residents into Sarah Connor isn’t a wise use of government power. Giving police additional deadly force powers is unlikely to heal the immense rift that has developed as cops continue to kill people with disturbing frequency, all while enjoying the sort of immunity that comes with the territory.

Attempts to mitigate the new threat authorized by this proposal were undermined by the San Francisco PD, which apparently thinks killing people with modified Johnny Fives is a good idea:

Peskin, chair of the committee, initially attempted to limit the SFPD’s authority over the department’s robots by inserting the sentence, “Robots shall not be used as a Use of Force against any person.”

The following week, the police struck out his suggestion with a thick red line.

It was replaced by language that codifies the department’s authority to use lethal force via robots: “Robots will only be used as a deadly force option when risk of loss of life to members of the public or officers are imminent and outweigh any other force option available to SFPD.”

The edit may seem all pointy-eared-Spock logical when taken at face value. But it isn’t. What cops believe poses an “imminent threat” to officers is so far outside the norm expected by “reasonable” citizens, it makes this edit meaningless. Cops are allowed to make highly-subjective judgment calls — the sort of thing that often leads to unarmed people (especially minorities) being killed by law enforcement officers. Add this right-optional autonomy to autonomous killing machines and you’re asking for the sort of trouble residents will be forced to subsidize as the city settles lawsuits triggered by cops who think a person’s mere existence is enough of a threat to justify deadly force.

Adding this to the arsenal of rights-optional weapons deployed by the SFPD ushers in a new era where cops can be judge, jury, and executioner. I mean, in many cases they already are. But this adds a level of Judge Dredd-adjacent dystopia where cops can try to claim it wasn’t them but rather the one-armed man robot. The San Francisco legislator should kill this bill deader than the residents the SFPD kills. The “imminent threat” justification is too vague and too easily abused to allow officers to absolve their own guilt by allowing a robotic assistant to perform killings on their behalf.

Filed Under: autonomous killing, london breed, robot police, robots, san francisco, sfpd

San Francisco Legislators Approve Bill Giving Cops Live, On Demand Access To Private Security Cameras

from the what's-yours-is-ours dept

If you don’t like people making “People’s Republic of California” jokes, maybe don’t do stuff like this:

The San Francisco Board of Supervisors, the legislative body for the city, voted 7-4 to test Mayor London Breed’s surveillance camera proposal, which will take effect in 30 days and sunset in 15 months.

Under the policy, the San Francisco Police Department (SFPD) can access cameras owned by city residents and businesses who give police the OK to monitor them, potentially opening up thousands of private surveillance cameras to officers.

This proposal first surfaced late in July. It was correctly, and incisively dismissed as a bunch of authoritarian horseshit by intrepid Techdirt contributor [checks byline] Tim Cushing shortly thereafter.

Whoever this “Tim Cushing” is, he definitely has his finger on the pulse of… um… horseshit. Whoever’s voting on regional Pulitzer prizes is asleep at the wheel.

Anyway, the pitch was this: some city officials, led by Mayor London Breed, decided the best way to protect the city from temporary statistical anomalies (read: crime rate bumps in a few key areas) was to give cops on-demand access to cameras operated by San Francisco residents.

The ends will justify the means, said none other than Mayor London Breed in her [checks URL] Medium post:

We also need to make sure our police officers have the proper tools to protect public safety responsibly. The police right now are barred from accessing or monitoring live video unless there are “exigent circumstances”, which are defined as events that involve an imminent danger of serious physical injury or death. If this high standard is not met, the Police can’t use live video feed, leaving our neighborhoods and retailers vulnerable.

These are the reasons why I authored this legislation. It will authorize police to use non-City cameras and camera networks to temporarily live monitor activity during significant events with public safety concerns, investigations relating to active misdemeanor and felony violations, and investigations into officer misconduct.

And that is what the city legislature has now approved: cops tapping into private cameras in real time for a plethora of reasons, very few of which justify this sort of heightened third-person scrutiny. Sure, there’s the always-popular “public safety” excuse for government incursion, which can sometimes get courts to ignore constitutional violations.

But it’s followed up with even worse excuses. “Significant events” means cops will decide what is or isn’t “significant.” And it won’t be limited to investigating and prosecuting serious crimes. As Mayor Breed freely notes, on-demand access to cameras owned and operated by residents will be used to curb the most frightening of urban menaces: misdemeanants.

Forget it Jakes of all makes and models in the San Francisco areas, it’s New Chinatown.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit organization that defends civil liberties in the digital space, called the new policy a “troubling ordinance” that could have a chilling effect on First Amendment and other rights.

“Make no mistake, misdemeanors like vandalism or jaywalking happen on nearly every street of San Francisco on any given day — meaning that this ordinance essentially gives the SFPD the ability to put the entire city under live surveillance indefinitely,” the organization wrote in a press release.

Yikes. But also apparently of no concern to the officials voting to make this law. The San Francisco PD supports it, of course, claiming it’s a force multiplier when it comes to investigating crimes. And the mayor has already made it clear Orwellian surveillance is preferable to whatever’s happening to crime rates under her watch.

The obvious point is this: if the SFPD demanded the erection of cameras everywhere people might be, people would revolt. The co-opting of private cameras, while obviously controversial, allows the SFPD to do the Orwellian thing, but without appearing to be the bad guy. Instead, the buck is held by the city council, which has decided people can’t control the things they own. All of it belongs to the government, which will use this unprecedented access to… well, who knows at this point? But the access is there. All that remains is to see how frequently it’s abused.

Filed Under: doorbell cameras, london breed, police, san francisco, sfpd, surveillance
Companies: amazon, ring

San Francisco Mayor Wants PD To Be Able To Commandeer Cameras Owned By Residents Because Reasons

from the yeah-that's-what-we-need:-more-authoritarianism dept

Ring has been bedding down as many law enforcement partners as possible, turning cops into brand evangelists with the implicit (and sometimes, explicit) promise they’ll have access to private citizens’ recordings. Ring likes this because it increases its market share. Cops like it because it gives them more camera coverage in the areas they patrol, at least theoretically.

Ring may allow cops to obtain footage without warrants or notification of affected users, but no city has expressly converted private citizens’ cameras into public utilities accessible with warrants or permission. Until now.

Having dumped its “progressive” District Attorney, Chesa Boudin, the city of San Francisco has decided it’s going to be far more Dirty Harry in the future. The alleged justification is (perhaps temporary and anomalous) increases in crime. It’s time to run roughshod over constitutional rights again, as Robyn Pennacchia reports for Wonkette. (h/t Michael Vario)

When people buy those Ring doorbell cameras, they do so to protect their own safety, so that they do not accidentally welcome an axe murderer into their home. It seems safe to say that they do not buy them so that the police can hijack them for the purposes of surveilling their community. But that is a thing that may be happening in San Francisco soon, now that progressive prosecutor Chesa Boudin has been replaced, by the mayor who wanted him recalled, with District Attorney Brooke Jenkins, a tough on crime prosecutor who quit her job in the DA’s office in order to lead the effort to recall Boudin as a “liberal.”

Progressive law enforcement is no longer on top. As Mayor London Breed states in her own Medium post, the future of the city will apparently include the remote seizure of private property by city law enforcement.

We also need to make sure our police officers have the proper tools to protect public safety responsibly. The police right now are barred from accessing or monitoring live video unless there are “exigent circumstances”, which are defined as events that involve an imminent danger of serious physical injury or death. If this high standard is not met, the Police can’t use live video feed, leaving our neighborhoods and retailers vulnerable.

That’s the supposed “problem” the mayor believes needs to be addressed. Here are the means, which will apparently be justified by the ends.

These are the reasons why I authored this legislation. It will authorize police to use non-City cameras and camera networks to temporarily live monitor activity during significant events with public safety concerns, investigations relating to active misdemeanor and felony violations, and investigations into officer misconduct.

So, basically for any reason. If the legislation manages to become law, there’s almost no chance it will survive a constitutional challenge. Limiting it to “significant events with public safety concerns” might have a chance (but still not much of one) but expanding it to include incidents that relate to every criminal law on the books means this law will be dead on arrival if its passes intact. Pretending cops will use the commandeered network of private cameras to “investigate officer misconduct” is a nice thing to say but seems like the least likely use of this city-approved intrusion.

If the mayor and the PD want more camera coverage, they can buy some cameras, hang them up, and turn them on. If San Francisco wants to become China-town, it can do it the old-fashioned way. What it definitely shouldn’t do is what the mayor is planning on doing: eminent domain but for privately owned cameras.

Filed Under: police, san francisco, sfpd, surveillance, video doorbells

San Francisco Public Records Task Force Threatens PD With Sanctions For Dodging Records Requests

from the selective-enforcement,-selective-compliance dept

California legislators finally lifted the opacity shrouding police misconduct records in early 2019. The new law eliminated exemptions, making police misconduct and use-of-force records available to records requesters for the first time in decades.

Full grown adults clothed in uniforms and armed with guns reacted like children. They sued. They shredded records. They pretended they couldn’t understand the nuances of the new law. They stonewalled, foot-dragged, and otherwise did everything they could to avoid complying with records requests.

But these activities aren’t limited to misconduct records. The usual evasiveness and stonewalling is still present when records of any sort are being requested from agencies — in this case, the San Francisco Police Department — that really don’t feel like handing them over.

Because the most popular option is to just dick around until you get sued, the SFPD dragged out the EFF’s facial recognition tech records requests for months, forcing it to exit the purely civic arena and bring it to the attention of the city’s public records oversight.

Following San Francisco’s ban on the use of facial recognition tech (followed shortly thereafter by a statewide ban), the EFF submitted requests related to an apparent violation of the ban by the SFPD. The PD sent a photo of a criminal suspect to the federally operated Northern California Regional Intelligence Center (NCRIC), which then performed a search using its facial recognition software and forwarded those results to the PD.

The EFF asked for documents detailing this apparently illegal move by the SFPD — one that appeared to be an attempt to find a workaround that would allow it to technically abide by the ban while simultaneously violating the spirit of the law. EFF asked for 11 different categories of documents related to this incident, covering everything from SFPD communications to data-sharing agreements with the fusion center.

This is what it received.

Despite seeking a time extension, SFPD provided only one document: an email statement to reporters regarding the incident in the Chronicle article. SFPD claimed some of the records were wholesale exempt because they were investigative. For the remaining items, SFPD claimed it could not locate any records, such as standard agreements that govern SFPD’s formal partnership with the fusion center.

The EFF then filed a complaint with the state’s Sunshine Ordinance Task Force. That prompted a bit more cooperation from the SFPD, which managed to find another 20 pages of emails and the bulletin it sent to the fusion center. But most of what the EFF requested still had yet to be turned over.

It took 18 months for the Task Force to take up the EFF’s complaint. When it finally had a chance to explain the SFPD’s ridiculous non-response, the EFF made it clear the PD was obviously doing whatever it could to avoid complying with its public records request.

As we told the task force: “It’s difficult to understand how SFPD could not find any information considering the city has two members of SFPD’s special investigations unit assigned to NCRIC and Chief [William] Scott is chair of the NCRIC executive board.” […] We also raised skepticism about SFPD’s claim that it could not find a single email discussing face recognition technology in the year and a half since the ban took effect.

The public records board apparently considered this a pretty persuasive argument. It’s not the SFPD that’s obligated to start doing things the right way. The Task Force ruled the PD violated multiple aspects of California’s public records laws. It gave the SFPD five days to comply with the EFF’s requests. And if it fails to do that, (unspecified) sanctions will be on the way.

This is also dangling over the PD’s head:

Initially, the Task Force voted to refer the matter to the San Francisco Ethics Commission for investigation of “willful failure” to comply with the law, a form of official misconduct. However, they rescinded that vote because it was unclear which official at SFPD should be named in the referral. Task Force members indicated that this option would remain available should SFPD fail to comply with its order.

It seems like this should properly motivate the SFPD to (nearly two years after the request was made) comply fully with the EFF’s request. And it puts the SFPD on the Task Force’s radar, which means it may move more quickly in the future if other requesters experience similar problems when dealing with this agency. Unfortunately, however this ends up resolving, it’s just more evidence showing our public servants rarely feel they’re obliged to serve the public.

Filed Under: facial recognition, public records, public records task force, sfpd, sunshine

San Francisco Cops Are Accessing Autonomous Vehicle Recordings To Collect Evidence

from the another-source-of-always-on-surveillance dept

This report, by Aaron Gordon for Motherboard, looks like a hypothetical dreamed up by a particularly cruel constitutional law professor:

For the last five years, driverless car companies have been testing their vehicles on public roads. These vehicles constantly roam neighborhoods while laden with a variety of sensors including video cameras capturing everything going on around them in order to operate safely and analyze instances where they don’t.

While the companies themselves, such as Alphabet’s Waymo and General Motors’ Cruise, tout the potential transportation benefits their services may one day offer, they don’t publicize another use case, one that is far less hypothetical: Mobile surveillance cameras for police departments.

It’s not quite as cut-and-dried as that last sentence. As far as we know, police departments do not have unfettered, real-time access to the recordings created constantly by autonomous vehicles. But they do have access to the recordings. That much is clear from the public records obtained by Motherboard.

The San Francisco PD has been using this footage to aid in investigations, apparently frequently. The training document says two things, neither of which address the particularly thorny constitutional questions they raise:

Autonomous vehicles are recording their surroundings continuously and have the potential to help with investigative leads.

There’s nothing untrue about this assertion and yet it says nothing about the processes used to obtain these recordings. That might have been a hypothetical if not for the following bullet point:

Information will be sent in how to access this potential evidence (Investigations has already done this several times)

Yikes.

That is problematic, as an EFF rep points out:

“This is very concerning,” Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) senior staff attorney Adam Schwartz told Motherboard. He said cars in general are troves of personal consumer data, but autonomous vehicles will have even more of that data from capturing the details of the world around them. “So when we see any police department identify AVs as a new source of evidence, that’s very concerning.”

So many questions.

An AV will not have a human driver, which lowers the expectation of privacy. That expectation reverts to the company deploying it, which makes it somewhat comparable to a third-party record: data obtained by an automatic process that belongs to the company deploying the data-gathering device (in this case, a car).

Since there’s no driver to challenge searches, the responsibility lies with the company deploying the vehicle. And, since the recordings presumably cover public areas where the privacy expectation is further lowered, it might be possible to obtain recordings with nothing more than a subpoena (or a friendly sounding email!)

That’s where things get even thornier, in terms of the Fourth Amendment. The document does not describe the process the SFPD investigations team uses to obtain recordings.

First of all, how does the SFPD even know if AV recordings might be useful in ongoing investigations? Presumably, AV operators are required to inform local government agencies of their plans so that they can be overseen and undertaken safely. If cops know the routes traveled, it makes sense they would pursue footage recorded at or around areas where suspected crimes were committed.

But who governs this access? Has the city enacted any limits? Or is it just assumed that anything traffic regulators have access to should be accessible to law enforcement?

Moving on from there, how does the PD approach these companies? Private searches (which may be how these recordings are viewed by courts) are legal provided law enforcement does nothing to encourage searches companies (or their employees) may not otherwise engage in. Can cops request AV companies run routes through “high crime” areas in hopes of collecting footage of crimes in progress? All judicial signs point to “no,” but that doesn’t mean it’s not happening.

AV testing is AV testing. It really doesn’t matter much where it’s happening, so some companies may engage in test runs in neighborhoods investigators think might provide more evidence or intel. If this is happening, that’s a real problem.

Unfortunately, we only know what the SFPD has released so far: a training document that says AV cars capture footage and that investigators have utilized that footage in the past. Future public records requests may shed more light on the matter, but for now, this is all we have. At some point, evidence gathered by autonomous vehicles may be challenged in court. If and when that happens, we may get even more answers. But it seems like this isn’t a problem capable of being quantified with this minimum amount of information. That doesn’t mean it should be ignored. It just means more data is needed to draw any solid conclusions.

Filed Under: 4th amendment, autonomous vehicles, monitoring, recordings, san francisco, sfpd, surveillance

San Francisco Cops Are Running Rape Victims' DNA Through Criminal Databases Because What Even The Fuck

from the converting-rape-victims-to-grist-for-the-jail-mill dept

There are things people expect the government to do. And then there are the things the government actually does. The government assumes many people are comfortable with things it does that are technically legal, but certainly not how the average government user expects the system to behave.

Some of this can be seen in the Third Party Doctrine, which says people who knowingly share information with third parties also willingly share it with the government. But very few citizens are actually cool with this extended sharing, no matter what the Supreme Court-created doctrine says. This tension between people’s actual expectations and the government’s portrayal of the people’s expectations is finally being addressed by the nation’s top court. Recent rulings have shifted the balance back towards actual reasonable expectations of privacy, but there’s still a whole lot of work to be done.

So, when rape victims report sexual assaults to law enforcement, they certainly don’t expect their DNA samples will be run through crime databases to see if these victims of crimes have committed any crimes. But that’s exactly what the San Francisco PD has been doing, according to this report from Megan Cassidy of the San Francisco Chronicle.

The San Francisco police crime lab has been entering sexual assault victims’ DNA profiles in a database used to identify suspects in crimes, District Attorney Chesa Boudin said Monday, an allegation that raises legal and ethical questions regarding the privacy rights of victims.

Boudin said his office was made aware of the purported practice last week, after a woman’s DNA collected years ago as part of a rape exam was used to link her to a recent property crime.

Shocking to the conscience, as the courts say? You’d better believe it. No one reporting a crime expects to be investigated for a different crime. And there are already enough logistical and psychological barriers standing between rape victims and justice. Knowing their rape kit might be processed in hopes of finding the accuser guilty of other crimes isn’t going to encourage more victims to step forward.

On top of that, it might be illegal. California has pretty robust protections for crime victims. The state has a “Victims’ Bill of Rights” that guarantees several things to those reporting crimes. Nothing explicitly forbids police from running victim DNA through crime lab databases, but this clause directly addresses the outcome of successful searches, which would result in publicly available records as police move forward with arresting and prosecuting the crime victim for crimes they allegedly committed.

To prevent the disclosure of confidential information or records to the defendant, the defendant’s attorney, or any other person acting on behalf of the defendant, which could be used to locate or harass the victim or the victim’s family or which disclose confidential communications made in the course of medical or counseling treatment, or which are otherwise privileged or confidential by law.

Prosecuting a crime creates plenty of paperwork and arrest records are public records. A defendant could easily access records about their accuser — records that wouldn’t have existed without the assistance of this completely extraneous search.

Fortunately, this revelation has prompted an internal investigation by the SFPD. Unfortunately, an internal investigation is also the easiest way to bury incriminating documents, stiff-arm outsiders seeking information, stonewall requests from city officials for more information, and, most importantly, find some way to clear anyone involved of wrongdoing.

SFPD police chief Bill Scott at least has the presence of mind to comprehend the problem this practice poses.

Scott said, “We must never create disincentives for crime victims to cooperate with police, and if it’s true that DNA collected from a rape or sexual assault victim has been used by SFPD to identify and apprehend that person as a suspect in another crime, I’m committed to ending the practice.”

Good. And: whatever. Don’t be “committed” to “ending the practice.” Just fucking do it. You’re the police chief. There’s no reason you can’t issue a mandate immediately forbidding running DNA searches on rape victims. I’m no expert on police protocol, but it seems like a memo beginning with “EFFECTIVE IMMEDIATELY” would end the practice, um, immediately and inform future violators of the potential consequences of their action. A wishy-washy “commitment” that’s accompanied by no action tells the rank-and-file they’re free to do whatever until the internal investigation is completed and its results handed over to city officials. Waiting until the facts are in (and thoroughly massaged) is a blank check for months or years of abuse.

And this sort of thing may not be an anomaly localized entirely within the SFPD. Other law enforcement agencies may be doing the same thing. The only difference is the SFPD was the first to successfully hit the middle of the Venn diagram containing rape victims and alleged criminals. Any other agency doing the same shady searching should probably knock it the fuck off. While it may seem like good police work to run searches on any DNA samples willingly handed to them, the optics — if nothing else — should be all the deterrent they need, especially when it comes to victims of sexual assault who are already treated with something approaching disdain by far too many law enforcement officers.

Filed Under: criminal database, dna, rape kits, rape victims, san francisco, sfpd

California Intelligence Center's Facial Recognition Searches Are Turning Good Evidence Into Illegally-Obtained Evidence

from the whoops dept

The San Francisco Police Department has found a way — perhaps inadvertently — to bypass the city’s ban on facial recognition use. As Megan Cassidy reports for the San Francisco Chronicle, all the SFPD has to do is notify other law enforcement agencies about crimes it’s investigating.

San Francisco police Sgt. Michael Andraychak said a photo taken from a San Francisco surveillance camera was used in a crime alert bulletin that asked neighboring agencies for assistance locating the suspect.

One of the agencies that received the alert was the Northern California Regional Intelligence Center, or NCRIC, a multi-jurisdictional law enforcement agency that conducts crime analyses and major investigations and coordinates counterterrorism and drug enforcement programs.

NCRIC, which uses facial recognition technology, ran the photo through its software, produced a match from its database and sent it to San Francisco police, Andraychak said.

Sgt. Andraychak pointed out the SFPD did not ask NCRIC to run this search. It simply sent out a bulletin and this was a proactive move by the Center. The Center’s use of facial recognition tech does not violate the statewide ban on the tech because the state legislation only forbids use of the tech in police body cameras. All of this is legal… at least up until someone wants to use the evidence in San Francisco.

Fortunately, the local prosecutor isn’t going to try to use inadvertently illegal evidence to secure a conviction.

[San Francisco District Attorney Chesa] Boudin said in order to successfully prosecute cases, his office needs to “rely on the integrity of the investigations and the evidence that we are presented.”

“San Francisco prohibits the use of facial recognition software, with very narrow exceptions,” he said. “We cannot rely on evidence gathered in violation of that law.”

This is the appropriate response. Rather than try to justify the evidence by noting the facial recognition search performed by the NCRIC complied with STATE law, the SF DA is going to eliminate this evidence from the case. This possibly means there’s no case left but that’s how things are supposed to go when evidence is gathered illegally.

Unfortunately for the SFPD (and officers in Oakland who are also subject to a facial recognition ban), this is what the NCRIC does on the regular, whether or not the agency posting the bulletin asks for a search to be run. If the NCRIC continues to do this, it’s going to jeopardize prosecutions in areas subject to bans. But it wouldn’t be that difficult to flag bulletins from cities with bans so helpful NCRIC analysts don’t provide the invaluable service of turning legally-obtained evidence into successful suppression motions. And it would be equally easy for law enforcement agencies to discard NCRIC search results they’re not supposed to have. This is a problem, but it’s one that can be solved fairly easily. But for now, it looks like prosecutors are taking the lead.

Filed Under: chesa boudin, facial recognition, ncric, san francisco, sfpd