As San Francisco law enforcement authorities tout recent gains against criminal activity, made possible by the use of new automated license plate reading (ALPR) street cameras, they and the data they generate are becoming an issue at City Hall again as members of the Board of Supervisors revisit regulation of the cameras. Meanwhile, the issue is also being used as ammunition in a factional fight within the local Democratic Party.
The latest development occurred on Tuesday when District 6 Supervisor Matt Dorsey, along with board President Rafael Mandelman and District 2 Supervisor Stephen Sherrill, introduced legislation to repeal part of the city law that allows courts to award attorneys’ fees and costs to parties that sue the city and win cases over violation of the city’s 2019 Surveillance Technology Ordinance.
Dorsey described the ordinance in a press release Tuesday as “absurdly detailed and onerous” and as allowing the author of the ordinance, Brian Hofer, the director of Secure Justice, a nonprofit that advocates for “municipal civilian oversight frameworks” to prevent government abuse of surveillance technology, to create a self-dealing scheme for himself and his nonprofit through lawsuits against the city over petty violations of the ordinance.
“The prevailing plaintiff fee and cost provisions that advocates wrote into our Surveillance Ordinance back in 2019 were irresponsible — incentivizing baseless but costly lawsuits that have already squandered hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars over bogus alleged violations of a law that has been an onerous mess since it was first enacted,” said Dorsey in a press release announcing the new legislation. He calls the lawsuits a “legislate-and-litigate” shakedown. “More recently, a lawsuit by Secure Justice exposed just how cynically self-dealing this shakedown is with claims that stand to reap significant financial rewards for the very same advocates who devised the laws in the first place.”
Legislative passage of the ordinance was spearheaded in 2019 by then-board President Aaron Peskin and gained international recognition for banning the use of facial recognition technology by police. However, it also contains other provisions affecting the use of different types of surveillance technology, including oversight and approval.
In 2020, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the American Civil Liberties Union sued the City and County of San Francisco, alleging that police had violated the ordinance during the George Floyd protests by using surveillance cameras operated by the Union Square Business Improvement District. The case was thrown out, and the advocacy groups lost again on appeal.
Meanwhile, by early 2024, then-mayor London Breed signed a law watering down the ordinance and authorizing the installation and use of 400 automated license plate reading cameras around the city, after expressing public frustration over aspects of the law. The city’s voters then approved a ballot measure that would allow police to use drones and street cameras more freely.
Later that year, Hofer’s nonprofit, Secure Justice, sued the city, claiming multiple violations of the Surveillance Technology Ordinance, including the use of unapproved technology, omissions in paperwork, deliberate evasion, such as by utilizing assets of other city agencies, and a violation of the ban on facial recognition technology. That case is still ongoing.
Fast forward to last July, when it was discovered that San Francisco and Oakland police had shared ALPR data with some federal agencies. The instances appear to violate the California Values Act, passed in 2015, which prevents agencies within California from sharing data with federal immigration authorities. Further investigation by the San Francisco Standard indicates that the disclosures were part of a much larger and possibly inadvertent sharing of data with federal and out-of-state agencies, including those on behalf of the Federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
The inadvertent sharing of the data may have been due to improperly set permissions for use of the data on the platform, which Flock Safety produces. The data itself is encrypted and secured according to federal Criminal Justice Information Services (CJIS) standards in the cloud via Amazon Web Services servers.
“This technology can be used by any city in alignment with their values. It’s just how you use it,” a representative from Flock Safety told The Voice in an interview.
Back at San Francisco City Hall, leftist supervisors jumped on the issue. Last month, members Connie Chan, Chyanne Chen, and Jackie Fielder introduced a resolution “urging San Francisco and California law enforcement agencies to ensure proper compliance between data sharing laws and local and statewide sanctuary laws to assure trust in law enforcement to our vulnerable immigrant communities.” The resolution has been referred to the Police and Sheriff’s Departments for comment and will likely be heard in committee next month.
Chan, who is the board’s budget chair and a protégé of Peskin, has an ambivalent record regarding the use of the cameras, initially delaying funding for them and then praising their use in her outreach to constituents. Meanwhile, she, along with other left-wing activists, has also litigated the issue in the political realm, attempting to discredit the local Democratic Party’s centrist leadership.
The executive board of the California Democratic Party considered and passed a resolution in late August “opposing sharing automated license plate reader data with ICE and other federal agencies.” One of a handful of members who questioned the resolution was San Francisco party chair Nancy Tung, who argued a blanket ban could hinder human trafficking and other life-saving investigations. “There wasn’t much room for nuance or thoughtful discussion in the debate,” Tung told The Voice at the time.
This prompted State Party Vice Chair David Campos, a former San Francisco supervisor and member of the party’s leftist faction, to launch a whisper campaign portraying Tung and other centrist Democrats as being aligned with President Donald Trump’s policies.
Tung clarified her position at the San Francisco Democratic County Central Committee’s Aug. 27 meeting. Then the following month, at a meeting held at the SEIU Local 87 hall in the Tenderloin, Chan, also a member of the committee, attempted to introduce a resolution similar in language to one passed by the state party. She submitted the resolution late, so Tung ended up introducing it, allowing her to solicit amendments, including from member Eric Kingsbury, which pivoted the resolution toward supporting the responsible use of the cameras and against sharing data with federal immigration authorities.
The resolution passed unanimously, but not before Chan discussed further concerns over the use of the cameras, including what she called “flaws with the technology” and issues around data breaches.
Meanwhile, Flock Safety announced in late August that it had suspended a pilot program with Federal Customs and Border Protection after an audit found that the federal agency had accessed state data from Illinois.