San Francisco billionaire Chris Larsen once again has wielded his wallet to keep city residents under the eye of all-seeing police surveilla
San Francisco billionaire Chris Larsen once again has wielded his wallet to keep city residents under the eye of all-seeing police surveillance.
The San Francisco Police Commission, the Board of Supervisors, and Mayor Daniel Lurie have signed off on Larsen’s $9.4 million gift of a new Real-Time Investigations Center. The plan involves moving the city’s existing police tech hub from the public Hall of Justice not to the city’s brand-new police headquarters but instead to a sublet in the Financial District building of Ripple Labs, Larsen’s crypto-transfer company. Although the city reportedly won’t be paying for the space, the lease reportedly cost Ripple $2.3 million and will last until December 2026.
The deal will also include a $7.25 million gift from the San Francisco Police Community Foundation that Larsen created. Police foundations are semi-public fundraising arms of police departments that allow them to buy technology and gear that the city will not give them money for.
In Los Angeles, the city’s police foundation got $178,000 from the company Target to pay for the services of the data analytics company Palantir to use for predictive policing. In Atlanta, the city’s police foundation funds a massive surveillance apparatus as well as the much-maligned Cop City training complex. (Despite police foundations’ insistence that they are not public entities and therefore do not need to be transparent or answer public records requests, a judge recently ordered the Atlanta Police Foundation to release documentation related to Cop City.)
A police foundation in San Francisco brings the same concerns: that an unaccountable and untransparent fundraising arm shmoozing with corporations and billionaires would fund unpopular surveillance measures without having to reveal much to the public.
Larsen was one of the deep pockets behind last year’s Proposition E, a ballot measure to supercharge surveillance in the city. The measure usurped the city’s 2019 surveillance transparency and accountability ordinance, which had required the SFPD to get the elected Board of Supervisors’ approval before buying and using new surveillance technology. This common-sense democratic hurdle was, apparently, a bridge too far for the SFPD and for Larsen.
We’re no fans of real-time crime centers (RTCCs), as they’re often called elsewhere, to start with. They’re basically control rooms that pull together all feeds from a vast warrantless digital dragnet, often including automated license plate readers, fixed cameras, officers’ body-worn cameras, drones, and other sources. It’s a means of consolidating constant surveillance of the entire population, tracking everyone wherever they go and whatever they do – worrisome at any time, but especially in a time of rising authoritarianism.
Think of what this data could do if it got into federal hands; imagine how vulnerable city residents would be subject to harassment if every move they made was centralized and recorded downtown. But you don’t have to imagine, because SFPD already has been caught sharing automated license plate reader data with out-of-state law enforcement agencies assisting in federal immigration investigations.
We’re especially opposed to RTCCs using live feeds from non-city surveillance cameras to push that panopticon’s boundaries even wider, as San Francisco’s does. Those semi-private networks of some 15,000 cameras, already abused by SFPD to surveil lawful protests against police violence, were funded in part by – you guessed it – Chris Larsen.
