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.

This is some 1984 level of surveillance.

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.