San Francisco Mayor London Breed has filed a ballot initiative on surveillance and policing that, if approved, would greatly erode our privacy rights, endanger marginalized communities, and roll back the incredible progress the city has made in creating democratic oversight of police’s use of...

crossposted from [email protected]

San Franciscans, get the word out for this ballot measure to be held March 5, 2024, to prevent police from playing around with surveillance technology for a year before they need to report it.

  • Drusas@kbin.social
    2·
    1 year ago

    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.

    • RentlarOP
      1·
      1 year ago

      Thanks for reading! And you’re exactly right, this effectively kneecaps the ballot initiative from 2019 to near uselessness, since the police can just experiment with something new (or something they call “new”) every year and oversight will be playing catch-up from way behind.