The News
The technology hub of San Francisco, one of the last holdouts on the use of policing tools from drones to facial recognition, is beginning to get comfortable with the controversial methods.
The city’s Board of Supervisors voted to ban facial recognition technology in 2019. But residents have been angered by what they see as a post-pandemic increase in crime, homelessness, and drugs, spurring lawmakers and voters to slowly back away from the anti-surveillance viewpoint. That has allowed law enforcement to experiment with the technology as the city deals with a significant shortage of police officers.
San Francisco will soon complete a rollout of 400 license plate readers made by Flock Safety that have the capability of notifying police immediately when a stolen or suspicious car enters the city limits, allowing them to apprehend suspects before they commit additional crimes.
“We’re on the late freight in using this technology,” said District Attorney Brooke Jenkins in an interview with Semafor. “This is a real game changer for a department that has not had any use of helicopters, drones, or these kinds of cameras. They’ve been old school, just cops chasing robbers, and we can’t continue to move forward that way.”
The shifts come as the city’s place in the American imagination — as the home of the counterculture, the birthplace of the tech boom, and the poster child for downtown anarchy, all at once — reaches one of its periodic peaks.
“In my hometown of San Francisco, Democrat rule has turned the streets of our beautiful city into a cesspool of open encampments and open drug use,” the investor David Sacks told Republicans gathered in Milwaukee last week.
And as Vice President Kamala Harris moves closer to becoming her party’s presidential nominee, her background as a former district attorney of the city will likely bring it even more into the conversation.
But San Francisco isn’t immune from the national backlash against progressive policing and prosecutors.
On Thursday, California Gov. Gavin Newsom, himself a former San Francisco mayor, ordered state and local agencies to begin removing homeless encampments.
Even as San Francisco gets comfortable with surveillance technology, the DA’s office and police are still deliberating on what is acceptable.
For instance, Jenkins said she has so far resisted the use of AI to write first drafts of police reports using bodycam footage. “I’m more of a proponent that we, as humans, need to be the ones sifting through what technology gathers for us,” she said. “I can cross examine a human witness or a human police officer to find out what sort of bias and other things may have played a role in an investigation. I can’t cross examine software.”
Jenkins has also banned the use of AI in the DA’s office to draft legal documents.
But the office is planning to use the technology to redact documents for facts that may indicate a suspects’ race, so that prosecutors can avoid using that identifier in a decision on whether to charge a suspect.
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The tide appeared to turn in 2022, when Supervisor Aaron Peskin sponsored a bill authored by Mayor London Breed that allowed law enforcement to use non-city owned camera footage to stop crime.
Peskin had been the sponsor of the 2019 bill that banned facial recognition. “As the author of the legislation that created reasonable regulations for oversight of the City’s use of surveillance technology, the policy as amended endeavors to balance the public’s civil liberties and right to privacy with practical logistics of enforcing the public’s safety,” he said at the time.
In March, San Francisco voters passed Proposition E, which allows the police department to use technology like drones and facial recognition for a year without getting approval from the board of supervisors.
“I think there were a number of board members who either were running to retain their seats or who were planning to run for other offices that had to make a choice of whether they stood against what their constituents were wanting,” said Jenkins.
The Flock Safety cameras have already been used to solve crimes, and Jenkins said her department is prosecuting a case where the license plate data could become evidence.
Flock’s founder, Garrett Langley, started the company after his neighborhood in an Atlanta suburb fell victim to a string of organized burglaries. Despite a lot of Ring doorbell footage, a police major told him he couldn’t do much with it and instead needed license plate data.
Langley called two friends at Georgia Tech and asked them to help him build a license plate reader, which he then installed in his neighborhood. A couple of months later, another break-in happened. Langley’s reader singled out a license plate that hadn’t been seen in the neighborhood before. Less than 12 hours later, the driver was arrested.
The device became the basis for Flock, founded in 2017 and now valued at $4 billion by investors like Founders Fund, Andreessen Horowitz, and Kleiner Perkins.
The cellular-connected, solar-powered cameras constantly capture license plates and can flag police when they see a stolen car, or a car with a mismatched plate. When crimes occur, such as a kidnapping, the cameras can help police quickly apprehend the perpetrators.
Flock cameras create a “vehicle fingerprint” for a car. So even if a criminal removes or switches a license plate on a car, the cameras can still locate it in real time to solve or stop a crime.
But the key to winning the business of San Francisco and other privacy-conscious cities was Flock’s customizable software that allows cities to adjust data retention policies and other privacy settings.
For instance, some cities might want to keep a database of license plates and locations indefinitely, which might help solve cold cases or aid in current investigations. Others, like San Francisco, opt for very short data retention time periods to protect against any possible abuse of the information.
“We let the city decide what is societally enforced,” said Langley in an interview with Semafor. “We’ll build that technology and then hand it over to the city.”
Reed’s view
As the pandemic fizzled and things began to get back to normal, I started hearing from friends who live in San Francisco about how furious they were about the lack of law and order on the streets. Most of these friends had young kids and had horror stories about brushes with danger and exposure to things kids should never see.
I live on the other side of the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco and when I take my kids into the city, I steer clear of certain areas. It’s been fascinating to observe, from a safe distance, how these problems have turned some people who are normally on the far left end of the political spectrum toward more conservative views.
Even during the pandemic, the draconian measures taken by the city and the chaos that ensued in its public schools pushed some people I know in that direction.
And more recently, the reaction to the Oct. 7 attacks in Israel, after which Jews in San Francisco endured ethnic slurs shouted at them and their children in front of synagogues during the High Holidays, have pushed even more people in the city away from the left.
San Francisco, as the district attorney pointed out to me, is one of the last cities to embrace the use of technology in law enforcement. That makes it a bellwether. If San Francisco is on board, the country is probably never going back.
But companies should look at San Francisco not as the last place they go to sell law enforcement tech, but the best proving ground: A place that is naturally skeptical, but newly open to it.
By working with lawmakers and law enforcement in San Francisco, tech companies can iron out privacy issues that some more aggressive cities might overlook.
Room for Disagreement
Pro-privacy groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation fought Prop E vigorously and have warned against the use of surveillance technology in crime fighting:
“Across the country, police often buy and deploy surveillance equipment without residents of their towns even knowing what police are using or how they’re using it. This means that dangerous technologies — technologies other cities have even banned — are being used without any transparency, accountability, or democratic control,” the Electronic Frontier Foundation wrote.
Notable
- It’s not just surveillance technology: San Francisco has been getting more conservative across the board, according to this Washington Post article from March.
Correction
An earlier version of this article incorrectly said that Glydways had won a contract for a 10-mile pilot program connecting Atlanta’s convention center and the airport. The initial pilot will be a half-mile portion of the route.