When San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin was ousted from office in a recall election last month, his deep-pocketed opponents painted a picture of a weak prosecutor with soft-on-crime policies catering to the social justice set.
Just weeks later, local officials have lurched in a dramatically new direction, advancing a sprawling surveillance program that would tap into private cameras across the city.
Under the latest policy proposed by a newly emboldened police department—and backed by Mayor London Breed and the new DA’s office—cops would be able to watch residents in real time during a “significant event with public safety concerns,” and as part of “investigations” relating to both “active misdemeanors” as well as felonies.
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The cameras available for access would include those with a variety of both low- and high-level capabilities. Everything from commercial to private doorbell cameras could ultimately be employed to keep tabs on possible crimes.
It’s not exactly shocking that the new district attorney, Brooke Jenkins, who helped lead the campaign to oust her former boss in Boudin, would push for new ways of helping cops crack down on crime. Critics who powered the recall also honed in on hate crimes against Asian Americans in the city, and the perception that Boudin—who once suggested an alleged murderer had a “temper tantrum”—was not taking them seriously.
But thanks to Boudin’s three-year tenure as a progressive DA who actually oversaw declining or stable rates of some crimes like homicide, the emerging campaign against the proposal has allies with inside knowledge of how criminals get busted.
And they are sounding the alarm.
“The mayor now controls the DA, and I think people should be very alarmed and be very, very wary of where their civil liberties are going, because they're trying to take us back to a police state where constitutional rights are trampled and police misconduct is overlooked,” former San Francisco Assistant District Attorney Arcelia Hurtado told The Daily Beast.
On Friday, Hurtado—along with 14 other former staffers—was ousted from the district attorney’s office by the new leadership. In addition to running that office’s innocence commission, she was head of training, culture, and the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion team at the office.
She also was slated to oversee the possible re-sentencing of the mayor’s older brother, Napoleon Brown.
Documents obtained by news outlet Mission Local on Monday gave credence to what multiple former employees of Boudin told The Daily Beast this week: that Mayor Breed had been unusually involved in the new DA Brooke Jenkins’ day-to-day. This reportedly included helping feed the new district attorney’s office press releases and the department’s memo supporting the new surveillance policy.
For months, Breed has inveighed about out-of-control crime, even declaring a state of emergency in the Tenderloin neighborhood. Spokespersons for District Attorney Jenkins and Mayor Breed did not respond to requests for comment.
In a post on Medium, Breed—who appointed Jenkins—praised the proposed policy as a chance to “prevent mistakes” and also curb the “chaos” of “organized drug dealing” and “robberies”.
“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,” Breed wrote.
The reason for that is fairly simple, local experts and activists say: San Francisco had, at least until recently, been on the vanguard of progressive safeguards on surveillance.
In 2019, the city passed a historic measure requiring the police to seek permission from the Board of Supervisors to use any kind of new surveillance technology—and banned the use of facial recognition.
Former police commission member and criminal defense lawyer John Hamasaki told The Daily Beast the confounding part of the updated policy proposal wasn’t just the question of civil liberties, but how it would work.
“It’s not really a driving need in terms of making criminal cases. The cameras are already there” and footage can be requested by cops after the fact, he said.
On Monday, Police Chief William Scott told city supervisors, who must approve the camera measure for it to go into effect, that live surveillance could help them watch drug dealing from afar instead of needing to put boots on the ground.
SFPD officials maintain that they are balancing privacy and security issues.
“We believe this is a necessary tool to address crime as it happens and to aid in ongoing investigations,” Police Chief William Scott wrote in an emailed statement to The Daily Beast. “It is our goal to define those limited and restricted circumstances when we can request use of privately owned video surveillance technology.”
That isn’t to say local police haven’t tried to push the boundaries of how they use live cameras in the recent past.
Following the George Floyd protests in the summer of 2020, advocates from the Electronic Frontier Foundation found through public record requests that the city had watched protesters live on a series of cameras that weren’t owned by cops.
They sued but lost, with the lawsuit currently in appeals. The judge ruled that because the city had already used those specific cameras to watch the city’s Pride parade and Super Bowl crowds before the 2019 safeguards went into effect, it was allowed to continue using the tech.
But Nathan Sheard, 46, a plaintiff in a 2020 lawsuit, told The Daily Beast that having police watching their protest had a chilling effect on San Franciscans.
“My ability to organize… is diminished by the fact that many people will have legitimate concerns about the impact that this type of surveillance would have, could have on their livelihoods,” Sheard told The Daily Beast.
The new measure would allow for even more unfettered access to live video. Still, there was little resistance as it worked its way through local government following its introduction in late May, and it may have gone largely undetected by the greater public—at least until last week.
According to at least one survey conducted on behalf of the ACLU, 60 percent of San Franciscans oppose the expansion of police surveillance. Fears about a newly-expanded surveillance regime have taken on new urgency in the wake of the reversal of Roe v. Wade, as people across the country worry their data will be used by anti-abortion prosecutors.
“If San Francisco does obtain footage from one of these private cameras, they are able to share it with law enforcement agencies that are out of state or federal agencies for any criminal or administrative investigation,” said Saira Hussain of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
“And so in this post-Roe landscape … we’re concerned about that footage potentially being used to criminalize people in their own states.“
On Monday, the Board of Supervisors extended public debate on the measure another week. Amendments to the policy were proposed by Supervisor Aaron Peskin, and a meeting between police and public defenders was promised in the ensuing days.
“I very much believe in Chief Scott,” Supervisor Peskin said at the hearing. “But this is not about Chief Scott. This is about a policy that will outlast this police chief and this board of supervisors.”
Despite the civil-liberties implications, Hurtado conceded that it was “common sense” live video could make police work smoother.
Then again, so would police not being required to read people their Miranda rights.
“But there’s a line that we need to draw,” she said. “We need to act ethically, and that’s the role of the prosecutors: not just to win cases—our job is to comply with the Constitution, and that seems to be lost in this whole idea.“
