Update: On January 2, the California Supreme Court rejected the San Bernardino police officers union request for a ruling on the effective date of SB 1421 and stay. By denying, SB 1421 goes into effect this morning and no further appeal is possible. See ruling below
When Governor Jerry Brown, somewhat to the surprise of many, signed Senate Bill 1421 in his last year as the governor of California, it was the dawn of a potential new era in transparency about the use of force, and sexual assault and evidence planting by California’s police officers.
But before the new bill even went into effect, a pitched legal battle began in the courts – and in city councils with shredders – throughout the state.
First off, on December 19, the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Employees’ Benefit Association asked a court to determine if Senate Bill 1421 applied retroactively i.e. to incidents that had occurred prior to January 1, 2019 – and to pause the bill’s enactment until the court decided. You can read the complaint below. [read more]
Then, on December 22, word hit the newspapers that the City of Inglewood had decided to shred investigative and disciplinary police records for use of force incidents that were older than five years. The City had formerly kept them for up to 25 years. The City Council changed the storage policy and authorized the shredding quietly at an unrecorded City Council meeting on December 11th. Inglewood insists the change was unrelated to the passage of Senate Bill 1421 and the possibility that some of the records might now be subject to public records requests. It is unclear if the shredding ordered by the City Council has occurred yet. The City of Long Beach did the same on December 18th, also claiming the decision was unrelated to the new law.
On December 28, a coalition of transparency and journalism organizations that included the LA Times, KQED-FM, the California Newspaper Publishers Assn and the First Amendment Center attempted to intervene in the San Bernardino lawsuit to preserve the law.
When I sit back and try to think about all the ways that modern consumer technology has entered our lives, I keep coming back to the idea of control.
Are you concerned you’re not getting enough exercise?
Count your steps with a smart watch.
Are you worried about burglars breaking in and stealing your stuff?
Think about installing a cloud-based camera in your living room.
Could your child be abducted on their way to school today?
Be responsible and equip them with a GPS tracker.
In a world that seems increasingly chaotic, we’re being offered more ways than ever to minimize risk. It’s a marketer’s dream come true: take an increasingly anxious population, gently guide them to internalize a few worst-case scenarios, and then turn around to sell them a sense of security.
[read more]
And the folks selling control seem to be winning– though maybe that’s not so hard to do when you’ve convinced our consumerist culture that “New is always Better” and “Growth mean Progress.” We’ve been promised a technologically-tuned, utopian future, and that appeals to people for a good reason. A world of total control– without theft, abuse, terrorism, or kidnappings– is tempting.
We’ll get the ability monitor our children, bodies, and homes, as long as Big Tech gets to make billions off the data, and the police will get license-plate-readers, facial recognition, and drones so they can keep tabs on which of us are showing up to the local protests. Welcome to the Utopia of Control.
If this future doesn’t sound so bad to you, consider one possible analogy: have you ever seen a close friend get trapped in a controlling relationship? If you have, you’ve noticed that it starts when one partner can’t process their own insecurities. Their inability to cope will give way to deeper feelings of paranoia, which they’ll try to regain control over, usually by displacing them directly onto their partner. It might start with looking through the other’s phone, or combing through their social media accounts, but it can escalate into demanding unreasonable amounts of attention (especially at the expense of other relationships), or even dictating which people are ok to hang out with.
As one partner exerts more control over the other, trust vanishes, behaviors incrementally change, seeds of anxiety germinate, and true self-expression begins to mute itself. Ironically, the moment when one achieves full control over their relationship, the relationship as we know it disappears. And while it might still be wrapped up in the language of affection, its core resembles something more akin to an interpersonal dictatorship.
I believe this mechanism slowly replicates itself in our homes and neighborhoods. And as the modern world drags us into our devices, maybe we’re actually displacing our insecurity of feeling disconnected from our immediate community onto a virtual community (though the structure of our economic system bears responsibility, too). If we feel disconnected from our community, there’s a good chance it’s because we simply don’t know the people in it– a phenomenon that’s common in regions like the Bay Area, where neighborhood demographics are shifting overnight.
And when people in a community don’t know each other, how can they trust each other?
As surveillance activists, we see case after case of law enforcement and tech corporations taking advantage of this sense of ‘otherness’ to push through more invasive technologies, whether it’s always-on microphones in our most underserved neighborhoods, or attempts to equip cameras with facial recognition. The justification they offer is to provide us with more security. The fantasy is to maintain control.
Communities will always have conflict, and maybe they’ll always have crime. But community also gives us the space for spontaneity and self-exploration, celebration and solidarity. Feeling like you’re part of a community is a part of feeling human. What happens to that community once we install cameras on every doorstep, plant microphones on telephone poles, and normalize the constant buzz of drones overhead?
Our challenge today is to honestly ask: even if we could design a world of total control, is that the world we want?
At the International Association of Chiefs of Police Conference in October, presenters from the Orlando Police Department issued a stern warning for fellow local law enforcement officials eager to start a small unmanned aerial systems (sUAS or drones) program.
“We don’t want to use them when people are exercising freedom of speech,” Orlando Police Sgt. Jeffrey Blye told the audience during the best practices portion of his talk. “Because that will destroy your program quickly.”
That is excellent advice for police departments, but sheriffs in the San Francisco Bay Area have chosen not to follow it.
15 prominent privacy groups (including Oakland Privacy) sent a letter to the CA Legislature encouraging them to strengthen California’s state privacy law (CCPA), the only statewide comprehensive consumer privacy legislation in the county, and prevent industry gutting it prior to 2020, when the law is scheduled to take effect.
The privacy groups stated “We urge you to keep the focus on strengthening protections for your constituents, and to reject efforts to diminish Californians’ privacy and security protections.”
Shotspotter, or SSTI Inc, the Newark, CA-based manufacturer of gunshot detention sensors that are in wide use in police departments around the country and many in the Bay Area, is a defendant in a civil rights lawsuit. The case alleges that Shotspotter conspired with the Rochester Police Department in the attempted framing of a police shooting victim with 4 felonies by altering their forensic report twice and then misplacing the original audio file.
Silvon Simmons was shot three times in April of 2016, charged with attempted murder, assault, and two counts of criminal weapon possession, incarcerated from April of 2016 to October of 2017 and finally acquitted of all charges. He filed a lawsuit against the Rochester PD and Shotspotter in August of 2018 for illegal search and seizure, false arrest, false imprisonment, the use of excessive force, falsification of evidence, malicious prosecution, and denial of a fair trial.
The civil rights complaint against Shotspotter can be read here.
Recent public records requests have confirmed that as of February 2018 at least three Bay Area Sheriff Departments were sharing license plate reader scans they collected with the San Diego sector of the Border Patrol via the Vigilant Solutions platform LEARN. The three confirmed Departments are Contra Costa, Marin and San Mateo. See sharing reports below.
