"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.
> 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.
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.
The SFPD are used to doing nothing[1], and will continue to do so until they face actual consequences for their ineptitude. The recall of a DA that believed police should not be free to commit crimes and the appointment of a pro-police DA in his place only emboldened them.
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.
Crime reduction is a multi-year cycle. Criminal cases are a six month to multi-year process. Putting more "bad guys" in jail eventually reduces crime as well as the chilling effect of "I knew a guy who did this and is still in jail so I won't do it."
San Francisco and California in general still have a lot of additional work that needs to be done to now empower the DA (they can obviously only enforce what is law).
This bit from the Chronicle I think sums up the DA change and its effect on policing: "A previous Chronicle analysis showed officers immediately made more stops after Jenkins was appointed, and the District Attorney’s Office’s data shows that has translated into more arrests. The D.A. data shows that police have presented about 100 more arrests to the office each month on average (about 755 a month) since she assumed office than the last months of Boudin’s tenure (640 a month). This increase didn’t happen in any of the past three summers, suggesting it’s not a seasonal pattern." https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/brooke-jenkins-chesa-...
> the chilling effect of "I knew a guy who did this and is still in jail so I won't do it."
This sounds logical to many people. But the actual empirical research in the area finds no strong link between sentence length and recidivism [1]. We can get better outcomes by, for example, making it easier for criminals to stay in contact with their family while in prison.
An alternative explanation is that your average criminal isn't very good at thinking about consequences.
Did you read the research you linked? It does not say what you claim it does, it actually claims the long sentences (over 60 months) deter recidivism significantly.
So after the DA changes, the police suddenly show up with a hundred more arrests per month on average? How was Boudin supposed to be tough on crime when the cops literally weren't arresting people.
Nevermind that doesn't tell us anything about whether or not those hundred extra arrests are actually useful.
Sounds a lot like cops not doing their job, and diverting the attention to a DA that wasn't cooperating with whatever they wanted.
multiple things can be true: SFPD is a borderline PAC at this point and does nothing, and the DAs office was reaching incredible amounts of incompetence under the previous DA, rivaled only by the rest of sf's government. whether it was literally showing up to court unprepared and getting chewed out by judges, being tone deaf towards certain communities, or seeming extremely aloof and nonchalant in the face of real crime concerns (blaming republicans doesn't work when there are like 3 of them in SF)
i don't trust the current DA's office either bc she was appointed by our incompetent mayor + is very cozy with the sfpd w/o recusing herself from cases involving them.
"Police bad" doesn't account for differences in performance between SF police and others. "DA bad" at least tries to do this (although as you note, is in some tension with the facts).
Sure, DA may not be the major issue on a fully objective level. But his point that "police suck" does not explain why SFPD is so bad relative to other cities still stands. If it's purely a police force problem, what makes SF police different? Genuinely curious if anyone has theories about this besides DA.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
In 1975 Gerald Ford was President, "Star Wars" had just started filming, and the Soviet Union was four years out from invading Afghanistan. A lot has changed in the 48 years since then.
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%
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.
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.
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.
Agreed, but it shows where the issue lies - with the City and County of San Francisco.
And honestly, looking at how Rincon Hill and Mission Bay both privatized their operations and keep the neighborhoods extremely clean and safe, I am starting to feel privatization is the only short term solution that might help, no matter how unsavory it is.
> Is it baked into my (high) rent and apartments pay out?
Yep! The parks, the library, the sprout social, and all the public areas are a mixed ownership between the City, the landlords (UDR, Avalon, etc), UCSF, the State of California, and Union Pacific. Also, because a decent portion of Mission Bay is owned by UCSF and Union Pacific, CHP and DoT can technically lay state and federal charges overriding local government - which is why the very few homeless you see in Mission Bay squat around the library and the community center (it's definitively City of SF land).
That’s really cool! Thanks for sharing. Living here definitely is a bubble, and in a good way. I feel 99% safe walking my dog late at night, and I’m generally not on edge here. And I’m still able to enjoy everything SF offers.
Agreed! I lived and help organize in Lower Nob Hill for several years, and it was a nice experience, but Mission Bay just has a better ambiance and quality of life (assuming you can afford it).
I know some people hate on it for being quiet, but it's only like 10-15 minutes away from other bustling parts of town like North Beach, Chinatown, Mission, etc via public transit or Uber - so honestly idk why people hate on it. I guess it's those 90s rage against the machine types.
Might be, but Union Square, Lower Nob Hill, and Tenderloin all fall under the SFPD's Tenderloin Prescinct - which has seen recruiting and staffing collapse (doesn't help that Tenderloin PD needs officers fluent in Arabic, Vietnamese, Teochow, Hokkien, Cantonese, Mandarin, Pashto, Nepali, Spanish, Mayan, and Khmer due to the demographics of the neighborhood).
There's a very real issue of understaffing and underfunding which leads to the issues that exist with SFPD today. The exact same neglect and funding crisis is impacting SFUSD, SFMTA, and other public institutions in the city.
Normally, I'm not a fan of privatization, but Rincon Hill and Mission Bay have both proven that public services are better provided by the private management those neighborhoods have.
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.
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.
- "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..."
> 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.
1. What the hell does "vocally pro-police" even mean? How is DA Jenkins any more pro-police than DA Gascon (who used to be a cop himself)?
2. Most of the regulations which make the criminal justice system in California (and the United States) ineffectual come from state regulations and common law precedent. For example, the court system deemed that bail must be offered in almost all situations (even for high risk defendants) and be affordable, and an attempt to revise this judgment to allow DAs to detain repeat violent offenders was defeated by the unholy alliance of bail bond companies and the ACLU.
I have literally not seen a single conference she has held without being flanked by sfpd officers. a key tenet of her campaign was rebuilding the relationship between the DA and sfpd. She supported every sfpd budget increase under her tenure and dropped charges on like the second sfpd cop to ever be charged by the city. her first major political move post appointment was backing a mayor/sfpd proposal to increase surveillance.
not saying if this is good or bad, and i don't know enough about the bail system to have an opinion, but its bad faith to say that she is not pro police, or at least pro sf police
This is a really random set of evidence for a relatively strong claim. For example, “the DA and police should be able to work together” is not radical pro-cop propaganda. It’s a fact of how the criminal justice system works. Similarly, dropping charges against a police officer for shooting a suspect who was actively attacking him is not radical; no mainstream advocacy org opposed the charging decision. The press conference claim is almost bizarre: I was at a walkthrough Jenkins did in the Castro with the district supervisor and merchant association where there was little if no police presence. In any case, what does that have to do with policy?
I didn’t say it was “bad faith” to say Jenkins is pro-police, I asked for a definition. As your response suggests, there isn’t much evidence to suggest Jenkins is particularly pro-police. She’s about as pro-police as every other DA besides Boudin who’s held office in San Francisco, a city which is historically the least pro-police in the entire country.
If the police helped her campaign, I would consider that strong evidence that they prefer her methods, ideas, and initiatives. That wasn't some offhand thing, that was a conscious choice for everyone involved.
You're ignoring is all of the small businesses owned by first generation immigrant families. Families that fled much worse conditions with nothing but the cloths on their backs. These are brown-skinned people that don't even speak English, yet managed to work their way to building a new life for their children worked. And then idiots have the gall to blame everything under the Sun for inarguable failed policies and the actions of people that should be locked up.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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?)
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.
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.
If they were going for the kill... They would have killed the owner that approached them.
The guns are drawn in case they can't see the felon. For example, a felon sees cop cars approaching and ducks down to not be seen, while he loads his handgun.
Until they have a grasp on the situation, I can see why a person would want to protect themselves with a gun when approaching a suspected car thief.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I feel like that just makes it worse (though I didn't know about the DA's office messing up the paperwork).
Let's assume that understaffing and additional work required to close cases are the main causes for the low clearance rates. Monitoring a legal protest in case crimes are committed seems profoundly wasteful, compared to working to resolve crimes that actually happened.
I don't envy SFPD. Trying to reduce crime in SF seems like a huge challenge that they are poorly equipped to solve, for many reasons. But the original comment in this thread is trying to justify surveillance here as preventing possible property crimes, and that just makes no sense to me.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> "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.
Okay - do we have relevant examples where the creepy spy-on-everyone technology came before the nasty authoritarian regime? East Germany, North Korea, Soviet Russia, etc. were dire places (for human rights) back when their State Security Ministries had not yet heard of transistors.
Guess what the OG 1933-45 Nazis used for the holocaust? Yup, prior existing databases and census information, to quickly identify Jews.
Isn't one of the reasons why you Americans don't mandate the possession of a valid passport or ID card to avoid the creation of such a database? Or why the ATF is forced to operate on paper card records to prevent the government from having a readily usable database to identify gun owners?
Besides, look up the No Fly list. Have the same name as a terrorist? You're not getting on that flight and it's barely possible to get removed from the list.
I'm looking for "Creepy Tech ==>> Bad Regime" causality. We could ban black robes, crypto, and toilet paper because Evil Overlords find those things useful - but such bans seem unlikely to have much anti-evil effect.
> ...why you Americans don't mandate the possession...
Sounds like you haven't tried to buy a beer in America. Let alone vote. Last time I volunteered for a local food bank (doing bottom-end manual labor), I was told to bring picture ID. I've only been volunteering for them about 25 years now.
The No Fly list is a far better argument against security theater and endless bungling at scale than it is an argument against creepy government. If the U.S. was preparing and serving chicken salad sandwiches as widely and incompetently as they're doing the No Fly list, then Food Poisoning would be the #1 cause of death in the U.S.
I hoped that "examples in the US" and "in modern times" was implied. I'm still waiting for those examples instead of "Remember the Stasi" and your parting slippery slope.
> I'm still waiting for those examples instead of "Remember the Stasi" and your parting slippery slope.
I'm German. Unlike you in the US, we have museums dedicated to the horrors of the NS regime as well as the Stasi and general GDR dictatorship around the country. I can recommend you a visit if you get the chance to visit Germany - there is no argument as convincing as actually seeing eyewitness accounts and evidence of how depraved humans can get.
I try to never learn things from other country's experiences, too, or the past in general. These criticism are always invalid until the society in question goes full fascist. Only then can wring our hands and be sad, but until then it's all abstract and not worth worrying about.
A classic slippery slope argument, free from anything like the burden of pointing to anything real. Where are the examples of this burgeoning techno-fascism? Where are the disappeared? Where is the American version of Zersetzung? Where is the creeping "social credit score" style of monitoring?
We've had this tech for a while now, so where are the examples of it being systematically abused by the government?
Have you heard of the No Fly list, with completely innocent people being flagged and finding it out to be almost impossible to get out of that database? Of people being denied entry to the US because CBP thinks they might be sex workers? About the prosecution of (suspected) sex workers in the US in general? About how marijuana was banned to target hippies and anti-war protesters? About how teachers can lose their license for talking about LGBT topics? About widespread dragnet subpoena abuse using Google Maps as data provider?
The No Fly List failing spectacularly as a bit of security theater is not a good argument against anything other than overly contrived security theater, and poor database controls.
The rest doesn't seem to have much to do with technology, more to do with Florida politics.
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.
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.
I feel like I'm not getting my point across very well. I'm not skeptical that law enforcement will seek to gather all of the info it can, just like the NSA does, I'm asking where the dystopian hellscape is as a result of this. Where are the comedians being banned like they are in China? Where is the social credit score? Where are the disappearances?
Everyone seems to be offering, "Think of how bad it could be," but most of their examples center on right wing politics rather than technology.
My feeling is that once you start compiling this data in a formal way, you’ve taken a significant step towards the dystopian events you’re describing. I agree that the ability to do a thing is not the same as the thing happening. However, exactly as I try and remove the ability to make manual mistakes from my deployment pipelines, I also think it’s good to restrict the ability to impose dystopian rules.
But that is a really big topic and I am not expecting you to say “oh yeah you’re right” just because I made a dubious analogy. I appreciate that you took the time to clarify.
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?
Not really, if you get into the story it's much less about abusing technology, and much more about abusing FISA courts. I also think that said courts releasing a public reprimand for that behavior is precisely the sort of accountability and transparency you don't get it in authoritarian regimes. The system isn't working perfectly by any means, but it isn't some techno-fascist hellscape. You could remove the technology from the story entirely and it would be the same.
You asked if the technology is actually used this way. The answer is, yes, it is (or at least similar abilities are misused in a similar way).
> Not really, if you get into the story it's much less about abusing technology, and much more about abusing FISA courts.
It's about law enforcement having easy access to information that they're not supposed to use unless they have good reason to, and them using the information even when they don't have good reason to.
> I also think that said courts releasing a public reprimand for that behavior is precisely the sort of accountability and transparency you don't get it in authoritarian regimes.
True, though I would have preferred denying those requests in the first place.
> The system isn't working perfectly by any means, but it isn't some techno-fascist hellscape.
Yet.
You seem to be attacking the thesis "these tools can only lead us to techno-fascism". But how about the converse thesis: "When fascism shows up, it will inevitably use these tools. And therefore we should be cautious about building these tools, and allowing the authorities to use them."
> You could remove the technology from the story entirely and it would be the same.
Without the technology, the data would not be (ab)used on anything like the same scale.
Look, I'm not entirely opposed to law enforcement having information available when they need it. But we keep expecting them to only use it when they have legally-recognized good reason, and they keep going well beyond that. We should know by now that there will be too many people in law enforcement who will attempt to abuse the process and subvert the limitations, and we should start thinking seriously about how to prevent that.
Whether "we can't prevent that (well enough)" is grounds for not building the tools at all is a different question, one we are not forced to answer quite yet. We should at least start at "how can we make these (much) harder to abuse".
...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?
Yeah this definitely comes across as a totally neutral and curious disposition about it.
Police abuses against dissidents and disinherited is widespread and well documented if you're not actively trying not to discover it. It's not other people's responsibility to do this work for you especially once you've gone out of your way to frame the very idea as "emotive nonsense."
Because we don’t have to. Our stance is that we don’t want our privacy infringed. It doesn’t matter if they used the cameras for bad things, people like me argue the mere possibility is unethical. What do gun owners want to own guns even though lots of people die from accidents, and banning guns would prevent that? Because they like the ability to not be impeded in their sport or defense.
Why even have any constraints on law enforcement if they’re so trustworthy? Just let them do anything to catch criminals and trust they don’t take it too far. There are rules for a reason here, it’s to preserve ideals that society holds as a group.
The police aren't the only ones in the equation, however. If law enforcement is completely powerless, then it's the criminals who will have free rein to violate people's rights and privacy. There is a balance to strike here, which requires open debate and deliberation.
South Africa, Somalia, much of Mexico, northern Myanmar, much of Syria, Sudan, the parts of Ukraine that are occupied by Russia… lots of places in the world, where the "official" government doesn't have real control.
Because like I said it's not our responsibility to. You're openly hostile to the idea of them existing and no one is obligated to talk you out of the cowardice you appear happy to inhabit.
> Because like I said it's not our responsibility to.
This sort of rhetoric is absolutely poisonous and supremely counterproductive to any social movement. No cause is too righteous to require participation in the political process. If there is an issue in society that you want corrected, it's on you to persuade others to support your cause. The status quo is innocent until proven guilty, the burden of proof rests on the prsopective reformer. That's how democracy has always worked!
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:
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.
I certainly don't want cameras inside my own house or office. But surveillance of public spaces (including public transit) is a good thing. We need public spaces to be safe because they provide cultural, economic, social, and climate benefits. In the absence of safety, people retreat to their houses. And they drive instead of taking transit.
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.
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.
Yes, but I am referring to the content of TFA, and the GP. San Francisco PD is supposed to abide by these strictures, and if they do not, we have a reckoning due aa a society.
Also protect citizens from other citizens. I don't for a second believe that all weak and strong citizens live happily together if there were no police.
In the US this is blindingly false. The police have absolutely zero obligation to protect you or your property. This is affirmed by multiple supreme court cases, including cases where the police actively destroyed people's property and at least one case their home.
I think you're going about that on the wrong angle; not that unnecessary willful destruction of property is good. But if police are present they have no requirement to stop a crime [1].
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.
SCOTUS has repeatedly considered the "chilling effect" of government policies to be sufficient to strike down government policies. Here's a long article from MTSU about the history of the "chilling effect" on First Amendment jurisprudence: https://mtsu.edu/first-amendment/article/897/chilling-effect
tl;dr: having a "chilling effect" is, according to SCOTUS, often (but not always) the same thing as "actively suppressing" freedom of speech.
The Supreme Court has held that anonymous speech is a huge part of the First Amendment as non-anonymous speech has a pretty chilling effect. With a surveillance state you are taking away the 'anonymizing' effect people felt of being in a crowd, that they could speak without being singled out.
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.
This is not, in practice, what they do. In reality, they tend to use overwhelming force with dubious justification (if any), escalate situations via techniques such as kettling of protestors, and arrest/brutalize people expressing their disapproval of the above. There are many instances where police use violence on nonviolent protestors, so how does that protect them from physical harm?
It's weird how 'Fix the problems that are being protested' is not an option on the table.
The answer to 'The police are indiscriminate and unaccountable in their use of violence against the public' always seems to be 'Employ even more indiscriminate and unaccountable violence against the public.' It's almost like that's the only response these institutions are capable of.
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_...