Don't Gut SF's Surveillance Ordinance

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Don't Gut SF Surveillance Ordinance

SF Mayor London Breed has a plan to weaken San Francisco's surveillance ordinance. The plan should be rejected by the Board of Supervisors, and by the residents of San Francisco, if it makes it to the ballot.

Breed wants to change SF law to allow the San Francisco Police Department to use public camera networks, more or less at will, to monitor public streets in real time, using only the most vaporous standard of short-term increases in street crime. Her proposed broad exemptions gut key provisions of current law that require SFPD to ask for permission, to clearly state how and when public monitoring can happen, and to establish guardrails preventing misuse and civil rights violations, on any occasion when there is not an imminent threat of death or significant injury to a person.

In other words: no oversight, no transparency, no accountability.

The reason for this proposed change isn't subtle. It's because, almost two years after SF's surveillance ordinance was passed, the San Francisco Police Department hasn't wanted to comply with it. Instead of asking to be able to use public cameras, SFPD went ahead and used them in secret to spy on the 2020 racial justice protests.

And they want to keep on doing it, whenever they want and in secret, with no limitations and no protections.

That isn't public safety, it's law enforcement overreach, and we say NO.

Use this easy one click action to tell the Mayor to withdraw her ill-considered plan and to tell the Board of Supervisors to reject it for the June ballot.

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San Francisco Mayor London Breed and SF Board of Supervisors

Subject: Don't Gut San Francisco's Surveillance Ordinance

Message:

Dear Mayor Breed and Board of Supervisors, I am writing today to ask Mayor Breed to withdraw her proposal to weaken San Francisco's surveillance ordinance and for the Board of Supervisors not to support it. San Francisco broke important ground when it became one of the largest municipalities in the country to declare that surveillance equipment would never be used in secret and without public accountability. Since 2019, numerous City departments have applied for and received permission to use surveillance technologies in ways that benefit the residents of San Francisco and with clear guardrails against misuse. The mayor's proposal seeks to shield the SF Police Department from the standards applied to, and successfully met, by other City departments and to prevent the establishment of those necessary guardrails. SFPD has had almost two years to ask for permission to use third party cameras for public safety needs and they failed to do so. Instead they chose to operate in secret, which has created liability for the City and civil rights concerns for racial justice protesters who participated in the protests against George Floyd's murder. Now the mayor is attempting to change the law, rather than ask the San Francisco Police Department to follow it. That is not the right answer. San Francisco residents have the right to know what surveillance technology the police have, how they are using it, and what protections are in place to prevent abuses that have happened, and continue to happen, all over the country. Accountability and oversight are not impediments to public safety. They are the basic building blocks of good governance. And public safety does not require the abridgement of first amendment rights or the complete loss of personal privacy. Please reject straw man arguments that pit fundamental freedoms and needs against each other and stand up for accountable government.

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