San Francisco Mayor London Breed has filed a ballot initiative on surveillance and policing that, if approved, would greatly erode our privacy rights, endanger marginalized communities, and roll back the incredible progress the city has made in creating democratic oversight of police’s use of surveillance technologies. The measure will be up for a vote during the March 5, 2024 election.
Specifically, the ballot measure would erode San Francisco’s landmark 2019 surveillance ordinance which requires city agencies, including the police department, to seek approval from the democratically-elected Board of Supervisors before it acquires or deploys new surveillance technologies. Agencies also need to put out a full report to the public about exactly how the technology would be used. This is an important way of making sure people who live or work in the city have a say in policing technologies that could be used in their communities.
However, the new ballot initiative attempts to gut the 2019 surveillance ordinance. The measure says “..the Police Department may acquire and/or use a Surveillance Technology so long as it submits a Surveillance Technology Policy to the Board of Supervisors for approve by ordinance within one year of the use or acquisition, and may continue to use that Surveillance Technology after the end of that year unless the Board adopts an ordinance that disapproves the Policy…” In other words, police would be able to deploy any technology they wished for a full year without any oversight, accountability, transparency, or semblance of democratic control.
But there is something we can do about this! It’s time to get the word out about what’s at stake during the March 5, 2024 election and urge voters to say NO to increased surveillance and decreased police accountability.
Like many other cities in the United States, this ballot measure would turn San Francisco into a laboratory where police are given free reign to use the most unproven, dangerous technologies on residents and visitors without regard for criticism or objection. That’s one year of police having the ability to take orders from faulty and racist algorithms. One year in which police could potentially contract with companies that buy up the geolocation data from millions of cellphones and sift through the data.
In the summer of 2020, in response to a mass Black-led movement against police violence that swept the nation, Mayor Breed said, “If we’re going to make real significant change, we need to fundamentally change the nature of policing itself…Let’s take this momentum and this opportunity at this moment to push for real change.” A central part of that vision was “ending the use of police in response to non-criminal activity; addressing police bias and strengthening accountability; [and] demilitarizing the police.”
It appears that Mayor Breed has turned her back on that stance and, with the introduction of her ballot measure, instead embraced increased surveillance and decreased police accountability. But there is something we can do about this! It’s time to get the word out about what’s at stake during the March 5, 2024 election and urge voters to say NO to increased surveillance and decreased police accountability.
There’s more: this Monday, November 13, 2023 at 10:00am PT, the Rules Committee of the Board of Supervisors will meet to discuss upcoming ballot measures, including this awful policing and surveillance ballot measure. You can watch the Rules Committee meeting here, and most importantly, the live feed will tell you how to call in and give public comment. Tell the Board’s Rules Committee that police should not have free reign to deploy dangerous and untested surveillance technologies in San Francisco .
