San Francisco to Deploy Mobile Surveillance Units in Latest Expansion of Police Tech

San Francisco is set to continue its expansion of police technology by rolling out automated surveillance cameras across the city as part of a new public safety program.

The announcement comes as San Francisco supervisors are set to vote Tuesday afternoon on whether to allow police to keep using privately owned surveillance cameras and expand the use of drones for investigations after voters granted police expanded powers in March.

Mayor London Breed joined District Attorney Brooke Jenkins and other city officials at a press conference on Monday on the Embarcadero to introduce the new round-the-clock surveillance units, which they said will start to launch in the next few weeks.

The mobile units include a 22-foot mast with three cameras, a speaker, floodlights and strobes, similar to those that have been placed in some grocery store parking lots and work sites. They will first be deployed to the Mission District, where residents have complained about illegal sex work and related problems, and to the Mid-Market area downtown, where the city has aimed to crack down on open-air drug markets.

Those locations were chosen based on community feedback, according to Police Chief Bill Scott, who said that law enforcement has “been really relentless in addressing open-air drug use and drug sales.”

The developments follow the passage of Proposition E, which gave San Francisco law enforcement officers more access to technological tools such as drones, automated license plate readers and surveillance and facial recognition cameras.

“We are in the tech capital of the world here in Silicon Valley, and we have to make sure that we are not behind the curve in using technology to our full advantage,” Jenkins said.

However, the fleet of mobile units could spark further backlash over the potential repercussions of Proposition E, whose critics questioned the implications it could hold for privacy violations and predictive policing among communities of color.

“Subjecting some of the most vulnerable populations in San Francisco to this dragnet surveillance is a ‘kitchen sink’ approach to public safety that capitalizes on residents’ fear of crime,” Matthew Guariglia, senior policy analyst at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said in a statement. “The city must be clear about how it plans to use these technologies and the protections it will give residents.”

Nicole Ozer, technology and civil liberties director for the ACLU of Northern California, echoed Guariglia’s sentiments, calling for the city to “stop rolling out expensive and invasive surveillance gadgets and instead get serious about improving the services that actually get people healthy and housed.”

Police and city officials said they believe the surveillance units and other technology will help to suppress crime rates and support the work of patrol officers.

“This is yet another piece of technology, another tool for our officers that we can use in the spirit of having our officers identify crime when it happens — sometimes before it happens — so we can go out and be proactive,” Scott said.

LiveView Technologies will supply the units. The company’s Chief Revenue Officer Mark Cranny gave a live demonstration of how the units work, emphasizing their cloud-based capacity for 24/7 recording, live streaming, and use of artificial intelligence to monitor and report suspicious activity.

Cranny added that law enforcement would be readily able to access the cameras in real-time and retrieve “evidence of a crime or incident that’s been committed during or after it’s taken place.” Operators can also talk remotely through the units’ speakers, which could be used to deescalate a situation before police are dispatched, Cranny said.

Scott invited feedback from residents and others about the plan.

“Please get in touch with us. We want to do this right, and we want to make this right,” he said.