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<span style="background-color:rgb(255,255,255)"><font size="1"><span style="color:rgb(255,0,0)"><i><font size="2">(Note Chesa Boudin seems to be supporting this! He could be pressed to rethink this surveillance scheme)</font></i><span style=""></span></span><br></font></span></div><div class="gmail-header gmail-reader-header gmail-reader-show-element"><span style="background-color:rgb(255,255,255)"><font size="1"><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/10/business/camera-surveillance-san-francisco.html">https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/10/business/camera-surveillance-san-francisco.html</a>
</font></span><h1 class="gmail-reader-title"><span style="background-color:rgb(255,255,255)">Why Is a Tech Executive Installing Security Cameras Around San Francisco?</span></h1>
<div class="gmail-credits gmail-reader-credits"><span style="background-color:rgb(255,255,255)">By Nellie Bowles - July 12, 2020<br></span></div>
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<div class="gmail-moz-reader-content gmail-reader-show-element"><div id="gmail-readability-page-1" class="gmail-page"><div id="gmail-fullBleedHeaderContent"><div><div><span style="background-color:rgb(255,255,255)"><img alt="A surveillance camera in the Japantown neighborhood of San Francisco." src="https://static01.nyt.com/images/2020/07/12/business/00citycamera1/merlin_172871553_7eeed22d-ffe9-4c8a-8248-d32ba35a5196-articleLarge.jpg?quality=75&auto=webp&disable=upscale" style="margin-right: 0px;" width="365" height="456"></span></div><span style="background-color:rgb(255,255,255)"><span><span></span></span></span></div><p><span style="background-color:rgb(255,255,255)">A surveillance camera in the Japantown neighborhood of San Francisco.<span><span>Credit...</span><span><span>Cayce Clifford for The New York Times</span></span></span></span></p></div><div><div><p><span style="background-color:rgb(255,255,255)">SAN
FRANCISCO — It sounds sinister. A soft-spoken cryptocurrency mogul is
paying for a private network of high-definition security cameras around
the city. Zoom in and you can see the finest details: the sticker on a
cellphone, the make of a backpack, the color of someone’s eyes.</span></p><p><span style="background-color:rgb(255,255,255)">But
in San Francisco, a city with a decades-long anti-authority streak,
from hippies and pioneering gay rights activists to the techno-utopian
libertarians and ultra-progressives of today, the crypto mogul has found
a surprisingly receptive audience.</span></p><p><span style="background-color:rgb(255,255,255)">Here’s why: While violent
crime is not high in the city, property crime is a constant headache.
Anyone who lives here knows you shouldn’t leave anything — not a pile of
change, not a scarf — in a parked car. Tourists visiting the city’s
vistas like Twin Peaks or the famously windy Lombard Street are easy
marks. The city government has struggled to solve the problem.</span></p><p><span style="background-color:rgb(255,255,255)">In
the middle of this is Chris Larsen, a 59-year-old tech industry veteran,
paying for hundreds of cameras. He sees it as an alternative system of
urban security, and he hopes it becomes a model for other cities.</span></p></div></div><div><div><p><span style="background-color:rgb(255,255,255)">This
just may be the best moment for him to explain why a rich guy paying
for surveillance cameras all over a city is not a terrifying invasion of
privacy. Around the country, Black Lives Matter movement protests have
led to a reckoning on policing and how it should be done. Many of the
activists leading this movement are fighting to abolish or defund —
reduce funding for — police departments. Last week in New York, for
example, the mayor announced the police budget would be <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/30/nyregion/nypd-budget.html" title="">cut by $1 billion</a>.</span></p><p><span style="background-color:rgb(255,255,255)">In
San Francisco, where many locals push for this kind of police reform,
those same locals are tired of the break-ins. So how do they reconcile
“defund the police” with “stop the smash and grabs”?</span></p><p><span style="background-color:rgb(255,255,255)">Mr. Larsen
believes he has the answer: Put security cameras in the hands of
neighborhood groups. Put them everywhere. He’s happy to pay for it.</span></p><h2 id="gmail-link-399ee295"><span style="background-color:rgb(255,255,255)">The local cryptocurrency guy</span></h2></div></div><div><div height="749.7333374023438px" width="600px"><div><div width="600px" height="749.7333374023438px"><div><div><div></div></div></div></div></div></div><div><div><span style="background-color:rgb(255,255,255)"><img alt="“They don’t care if they’re being seen,” Chris Larsen said of smash-and-grab thieves in San Francisco." src="https://static01.nyt.com/images/2020/07/12/business/00citycameras2/00citycamera2-articleLarge.jpg?quality=75&auto=webp&disable=upscale" style="margin-right: 0px;" width="365" height="456"></span></div><span style="background-color:rgb(255,255,255)"><span>Credit...</span><span>Cayce Clifford for The New York Times</span></span></div></div><div><p><span style="background-color:rgb(255,255,255)">First,
let’s state the obvious reason — besides privacy concerns — that Mr.
Larsen’s plan might be viewed with suspicion: He’s in tech.</span></p></div><div><div><p><span style="background-color:rgb(255,255,255)">Longtime
San Francisco residents and the tech workers have not historically seen
eye-to-eye on many things. The natives resent the private tech shuttle
buses and the spiraling cost of living brought on by the new arrivals.
They even resent their housing aesthetic: Glass and metal and pretty
Victorian houses now painted in shades of black and gray.</span></p><p><span style="background-color:rgb(255,255,255)">But
here’s where it gets more complicated: Privatization is hardly a new
thing in the city. Around a quarter of San Francisco parents send their
children to private school, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/25/us/san-francisco-school-segregation.html" title="">a higher percentage than many large cities, including New York</a>.
Private security officers are a common sight. Plenty of people already
have security cameras pointing toward the street. So would a privately
owned camera network be so out of bounds?</span></p><p><span style="background-color:rgb(255,255,255)">And Mr. Larsen is no
tech carpetbagger. He grew up in a middle-class family in the Bay Area.
His father worked the night shift as a mechanic at the San Francisco
airport. In 1984, he graduated from San Francisco State University, and
he is now a major benefactor, donating one of the largest gifts the
school has ever received. He also has been a longtime advocate for
privacy, cofounding the coalition Californians for Privacy Now to help
pass a 2004 privacy bill, California S.B.1, commonly known as the
California Financial Information Privacy Act.</span></p><p><span style="background-color:rgb(255,255,255)">In 1997, Mr. Larsen
co-founded an online lending company called E-Loan, which went public
two years later, and he stayed on as chief executive until 2005. In
2012, he co-founded a start-up that would be called Ripple, which helped
people send money online using so-called blockchain technology and the
digital token called XRP. During the peak of the speculator-crazed
crypto boom of 2017,<a href="https://cointelegraph.com/xrp-price-index" title="" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank"> its value spiked</a> wildly. Mr. Larsen became one of the few crypto entrepreneurs to make and then hang onto that overnight fortune.</span></p><p><span style="background-color:rgb(255,255,255)">His
apartment on Russian Hill has a trophy view of San Francisco Bay and
the tight curves of Lombard Street. But also: the crews coming in to rob
tourists’ cars, right in the middle of the day. Mr. Larsen watches the
police drive by, and the criminals arriving 15 seconds later, smashing
the vehicles’ windows and stealing luggage.</span></p><p><span style="background-color:rgb(255,255,255)">“They don’t care at all — they don’t care if they’re being seen,” Mr. Larsen said. “It’s brazen.”</span></p><p><span style="background-color:rgb(255,255,255)">His
father-in-law’s car was robbed. Mr. Larsen’s own car windows were
smashed. When a group of men climbed into his garden and one of them cut
the wires on his home security system, while his children were sleeping
inside, Mr. Larsen decided that he had had enough.</span></p></div></div><div><div height="630.2999877929688px" width="945px"><div><div width="945px" height="630.2999877929688px"><div><div><div><span style="background-color:rgb(255,255,255)"><img alt="" src="https://static01.nyt.com/images/2020/07/09/business/00CITYCAMERAS-GRID/00CITYCAMERAS-GRID-articleLarge.jpg?quality=75&auto=webp&disable=upscale" style="margin-right: 0px;" width="456" height="304"></span></div></div></div></div></div></div><div><div><p><span style="background-color:rgb(255,255,255)"></span></p><div><div></div></div></div><span style="background-color:rgb(255,255,255)"><span>Credit...</span><span>Cayce Clifford</span></span></div></div><div><div><p><span style="background-color:rgb(255,255,255)">When
I wrote to Mr. Larsen asking for an interview, he immediately said yes,
and he answered all of my questions. He said he knew that what he was
doing might raise concerns, so he wanted to be open about it.</span></p><p><span style="background-color:rgb(255,255,255)">Here
is what he is doing: Writing checks for nearly $4 million to buy
cameras that record high-definition video of the streets and paying to
have them maintained by a company called Applied Video Solutions The
rest is up to locals in neighborhood coalitions like Community Benefit
Districts, nonprofits formed to provide services to the area.</span></p><p><span style="background-color:rgb(255,255,255)">Here
is how the project works: Neighbors band together and decide where to
put the cameras. They are installed on private property at the
discretion of the property owner, and in San Francisco many home and
business owners want them. The footage is monitored by the neighborhood
coalition. The cameras are always recording.</span></p><p><span style="background-color:rgb(255,255,255)">The cameras are not
hidden. Mr. Larsen believes they can serve as both deterrent and aid in
investigations, but it is difficult to say how effective they have been
in reducing overall crime.</span></p><p><span style="background-color:rgb(255,255,255)">Camera surveillance is happening in a lot of cities, but usually it is managed by police departments. In London, there are <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/15/technology/britain-surveillance-privacy.html" title="">around 420,000 closed-circuit cameras, according to a 2017 report by the Brookings Institution</a>,
and the city has begun testing using facial recognition software. In
New York, too, cameras are common. In Newark, anyone with an internet
connection <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/09/nyregion/newark-surveillance-cameras-police.html" title="">can watch the streets</a> from the city’s police cameras, which have a Newark police department placard to warn that the area is under surveillance.</span></p><p><span style="background-color:rgb(255,255,255)">San
Francisco is unique in that the cameras are not being installed and
monitored by the police but by private citizens, and it is unique in
that one person is paying for so much of it.</span></p><p><span style="background-color:rgb(255,255,255)">Mr. Larsen started
installing them in 2012 with just a few around his neighborhood. These
days, he funds a network of more than 1,000. He funds the C.B.D.s to
control and monitor them. He funds the longstanding nonprofit SF Safe,
which supports neighborhood watch groups and the Police Department.</span></p></div></div><div><div><p><span style="background-color:rgb(255,255,255)">Some
of the city’s densest neighborhoods and commercial corridors — like
Union Square, Japantown, Fisherman’s Wharf, the Tenderloin and Russian
Hill — have signed on, and now the network includes 135 blocks.</span></p><p><span style="background-color:rgb(255,255,255)">“You
think they have all these video banks in their police stations? No.
Mostly they don’t have decent internet connections,” Mr. Larsen said.
“So we helped pay for some internet connections.”</span></p><p><span style="background-color:rgb(255,255,255)">From Japantown’s
restaurants and nursing homes to the Union Square shopping district,
business and homeowners have welcomed his cameras. Every neighborhood
has sought to expand their program since installing. As proponents of
Mr. Larsen’s network see things, they get the safety of a surveillance
state without the state.</span></p><p><span style="background-color:rgb(255,255,255)">“If you went to the board of supervisors
and asked the members to approve this, you’d end up having a
conversation about government and surveillance,” said Simon Bertrang,
the head of a community benefit district, a coalition of businesses,
residents and property owners in the Tenderloin.</span></p><p><span style="background-color:rgb(255,255,255)">A few of the
neighborhoods watch the footage live, others don’t. If someone wants the
footage — a police officer or a crime victim or a defense lawyer — they
ask the neighborhood coalition for it.</span></p><p><span style="background-color:rgb(255,255,255)">His ally in all of this is
someone very different and a little surprising: Chesa Boudin, the new,
ultraprogressive district attorney of San Francisco.</span></p><p><span style="background-color:rgb(255,255,255)">Mr. Boudin, a
fiery lawyer who wants radical policing and sentencing reform, became
San Francisco’s district attorney in January. And he won despite a
ferocious <a href="https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/philmatier/article/SF-police-union-had-plenty-of-out-of-town-company-14821564.php" title="" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">$700,000 opposition campaign</a>
by the city Police Department’s union. Now, the 39-year-old Mr. Boudin,
son of two members of the militant organization Weather Underground,
has elevated the calls to defund police departments.</span></p></div></div><div><div><p><span style="background-color:rgb(255,255,255)">“In less than 24 hours my office has received over 1,000 emails demanding that San Francisco defund the police department,” <a href="https://twitter.com/chesaboudin/status/1269089684484833280" title="" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">he tweeted on June 5</a>.</span></p><p><span style="background-color:rgb(255,255,255)">Mr. Boudin likes Mr. Larsen and vice versa.</span></p><h2 id="gmail-link-1bc18fa0"><span style="background-color:rgb(255,255,255)">The community groups</span></h2></div></div><div><div height="755.816650390625px" width="945px"><div><div width="945px" height="755.816650390625px"><div><div><div><span style="background-color:rgb(255,255,255)"><img alt="" src="https://static01.nyt.com/images/2020/07/12/business/00citycameras3/merlin_172871388_f3407985-81d5-44e6-953d-522125783ddc-articleLarge.jpg?quality=75&auto=webp&disable=upscale" style="margin-right: 0px;" width="456" height="365"></span></div></div></div></div></div></div><div><div><div><div></div></div></div><span style="background-color:rgb(255,255,255)"><span>Credit...</span><span>Cayce Clifford for The New York Times</span></span></div></div><div><div><p><span style="background-color:rgb(255,255,255)">In
January, Mr. Larsen and Mr. Boudin met in Japantown and walked to its
Community Benefit District office. It was a small office with three
desks, one tiny dog bed, and two large screens with live video of the
streets. The screens are monitored by the two-person benefit district
staff. That equipment is paid for by Mr. Larsen. The rest was paid by
the benefit district members.</span></p><p><span style="background-color:rgb(255,255,255)">The myriad C.B.D.s, coalitions of
local property owners, had mostly been around since the mid-2000s, so
Mr. Larsen used that infrastructure as the local organizing unit to take
his funding and use his supplier at Applied Video Solutions to buy and
install cameras. They said the footage was only stored locally within
each C.B.D. office and erased after 30 days.</span></p><p><span style="background-color:rgb(255,255,255)">In Japantown, the
group mostly uses the cameras to find where a car window has been
shattered or trash has been dumped so they can send the neighborhood’s
private cleanup crew, paid for by local property owners. Other events
they report to the police department. There was the bike theft, the
phone theft, the backpacks and purses. One time a golden retriever was
stolen, and they sent the footage to the San Francisco Police
Department, which used the cameras to track him down.</span></p><p><span style="background-color:rgb(255,255,255)">Dmitri
Shimolin, the head of Applied Video Solutions in San Francisco’s Mission
District, was at the computer leading the demonstration. He zoomed in
to show the quality of footage the cameras were getting.</span></p><p><span style="background-color:rgb(255,255,255)">“An
arrest was made from some footage, and we called the guy ‘Dimples’
because you could see the dimples on his face,” Mr. Shimolin said.</span></p></div></div><div><div><p><span style="background-color:rgb(255,255,255)">The
image quality from the cameras is much better than typical
home-security cameras like Ring or Nest, and the field of vision is
larger. It is arguably more compelling evidence in court because the
video is monitored by a third-party intermediary who can testify that it
is a continuous feed. It is time stamped. And because the network
covers many blocks, the footage can tell a broader story than a single
camera about an event that might be moving from block to block, in the
case of, for example, a fight.</span></p><p><span style="background-color:rgb(255,255,255)">One side effect of the cameras is
that when one C.B.D. installs them, it seems to push crime just a few
blocks away, Mr. Larsen said.</span></p><p><span style="background-color:rgb(255,255,255)">“It’s whack-a-mole,” Mr. Larsen said.</span></p><p><span style="background-color:rgb(255,255,255)">The
same day as the Japantown meeting, Mr. Larsen and Mr. Boudin drove to
the C.B.D. headquarters in the Tenderloin, the city’s roughest
neighborhood. They sat at a folding table with about 10 people.
Conspicuously not present: anyone from the Police Department.</span></p><p><span style="background-color:rgb(255,255,255)">Last
year, someone was shot dead right in front of the office during a team
meeting. Shootings have more than doubled in the neighborhood, up 130
percent in a year, they said. Since the coronavirus pandemic began, the
number of tents for homeless people in the neighborhood had ballooned
from around 120 to around 400, <a href="https://www.sfchronicle.com/local-politics/article/San-Francisco-strikes-deal-over-Tenderloin-15336228.php" title="" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">until a lawsuit from local residents</a> led the city to move the tent-dwellers into safe sleeping sites, the group’s leader, Mr. Bertrang, said.</span></p><p><span style="background-color:rgb(255,255,255)">“We
don’t have a good law enforcement response right now,” Mr. Boudin told
the group. “It takes 10 cops to do a single drug bust, costs $20,000 or
something. And I don’t want my attorneys to be doing this for no benefit
on the street.”</span></p><p><span style="background-color:rgb(255,255,255)">He said the more effective strategy would be to focus on the crime ring leaders, rather than the people on the sidewalks.</span></p><p><span style="background-color:rgb(255,255,255)">The
surveillance footage is completely deleted after 30 days, and Mr.
Boudin wondered if it could be stored longer, giving his office more
time to put a case together.</span></p></div></div><div><div><p><span style="background-color:rgb(255,255,255)">“Sixty days would be nice,” Mr. Boudin said. “A preliminary hearing has to happen within 60 days.”</span></p><p><span style="background-color:rgb(255,255,255)">The
district attorney knows the alliance is a curious one. If the goal is
to reduce the power of police, private donors like Mr. Larsen can be
extremely helpful. But he worries their help can also involve private
individuals too deeply in crime-fighting, and he is not sure how much to
lean on Mr. Larsen. “What I don’t know is where his work ends, right?”
Mr. Boudin said. “There’s real risks.”</span></p><h2 id="gmail-link-4957f3c8"><span style="background-color:rgb(255,255,255)">The privacy fears</span></h2></div></div><div><div height="690.2999877929688px" width="945px"><div><div width="945px" height="690.2999877929688px"><div><div><div><span style="background-color:rgb(255,255,255)"><img alt="" src="https://static01.nyt.com/images/2020/07/12/business/00citycameras5/00citycameras5-articleLarge.jpg?quality=75&auto=webp&disable=upscale" style="margin-right: 0px;" width="456" height="333"></span></div></div></div></div></div></div><div><div><div><div><span style="background-color:rgb(255,255,255)"><span>Credit...</span><span>Cayce Clifford for The New York Times</span></span></div></div></div></div></div><div><div><p><span style="background-color:rgb(255,255,255)">The
protest movement that is rocking police departments around the country
hinges on videos. The shaking cellphone videos of killings have captured
moments so irrefutable that it has inspired rage from more corners than
just longtime police reform activists. Calls to defund police
departments are getting real traction.</span></p><p><span style="background-color:rgb(255,255,255)">And into this Mr. Larsen presents his solution: Go around the police.</span></p><p><span style="background-color:rgb(255,255,255)">“This
has underscored the importance of not just cameras but of communitywide
camera coverage,” Mr. Larsen said. “Body cams show some pretty core
weaknesses because we don’t have universal access to police body cam
footage, and there’s a fundamental conflict of interest if the video
shows something bad for the department.”</span></p><p><span style="background-color:rgb(255,255,255)">The answer is more cameras, he said, and then keep that footage in the hands of citizens.</span></p><p><span style="background-color:rgb(255,255,255)">“We
do not work with Mr. Larsen,” a police department spokesman wrote in an
email. “There is a process for the department to request footage from
the party that manages the cameras. That party has the discretion
whether or not to release footage to S.F.P.D.”</span></p><p><span style="background-color:rgb(255,255,255)">When crime-fighting
is put into civilian hands, new and unregulated behaviors can emerge.
San Francisco’s police are controlled by many laws that do not apply to
civilians. One of those laws is that the police in the city may not use
facial-recognition technology.</span></p><p><span style="background-color:rgb(255,255,255)">“San Francisco has passed a very
sophisticated surveillance ordinance that bans facial recognition by the
Police Department, but yet you have these independent agencies within
the city limits making their own decisions,” said Dave Maass, a senior
investigative researcher at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a
privacy advocacy group.</span></p></div></div><div><div><p><span style="background-color:rgb(255,255,255)">The technology that
Mr. Larsen is using is sophisticated — video management from Motorola
Solutions, evidence management from Genetec. Those same cameras, and the
software supporting them, can be used for more than what they are
currently doing.</span></p><p><span style="background-color:rgb(255,255,255)">“This is a system that is designed to scale up to
do license plate reading and facial recognition,” Mr. Maass said. “That
is where it’s going.”</span></p><p><span style="background-color:rgb(255,255,255)">Mr. Larsen balked at the idea of his
cameras using facial recognition: “We’re strongly opposed to facial
recognition technology,” he said. “Facial recognition is too powerful
given the lack of laws and protections to make it acceptable.”</span></p><p><span style="background-color:rgb(255,255,255)">Circumventing
the police means a lot of people now can make decisions about how crime
is handled, and watchdogs worry about cameras being used for spotty or
biased monitoring of the community. Putting more power over security
into the hands of local leaders does not mean that power necessarily
will be used wisely.</span></p><p><span style="background-color:rgb(255,255,255)">“There is distrust of law enforcement, and so
there are these community efforts to self-police,” said Daniel
Lawrence, principal research associate at the nonpartisan Urban
Institute. But, he added, “there needs to be some sort of system that
ensures the laws of society are applicable to everybody.”</span></p><p><span style="background-color:rgb(255,255,255)">Mr. Larsen acknowledged the issue.</span></p><p><span style="background-color:rgb(255,255,255)">He
argued that trust will come in the form of full city camera coverage,
so police can play a smaller, more subtle role. Individual vigilantism
will not work, he argued, but strong neighborhoods with continuous video
feeds on every corner will.</span></p><p><span style="background-color:rgb(255,255,255)">“That’s the winning formula,” Mr. Larsen said. “Pure coverage.”</span></p></div></div><div><div><div><p><span style="background-color:rgb(255,255,255)">Nellie
Bowles covers tech and internet culture from San Francisco for The New
York Times. Before joining The Times, she was a correspondent for “VICE
News Tonight.” She has written for California Sunday, Recode, The
Guardian, and the San Francisco Chronicle. <span> <a href="https://twitter.com/nelliebowles" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank"><span>@</span>nelliebowles</a><br></span></span></p><p><span style="background-color:rgb(255,255,255)"><br><span> </span></span></p></div></div><p><span style="background-color:rgb(255,255,255)">A version of this article appears in print on July 12, 2020, Section BU, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: He’ll Pay for the Cameras<span>.<a href="http://www.nytreprints.com/"><br></a></span></span></p></div></div></div>
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