back to article San Francisco mayor suggests police drones and CCTV can cure city's crime woes

San Francisco's mayor, London Breed, has proposed drone surveillance and cameras on public buildings to curb the city's crime problems. In a ballot measure proposed on Tuesday, Breed said new techniques are needed to help police stop criminal behaviour that endangers the public. “We need to give our officers the tools …

  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Not the problem

    The reason police don't deal with low level crime is that they, and the criminals, know nothing will happen.

    A fine? They are homeless and have no money = they aren't going to pay.

    Prison? The taxpayer is going to pay $100k/year to jail somebody for stealing a few $ ?

    The only solution is transportation to Australia

    1. DS999 Silver badge

      Re: Not the problem

      Well the funny thing is that in the US a lot of people are quite happy to pay $100K a year (it is probably more, especially in SF) to jail someone, but paying far less to provide them dorm style housing is a non starter. I'm not saying that providing housing is the solution to the homeless problem, it is obviously way more complex, but I always laugh when I hear someone object to any plan that might actually help the homeless if it costs taxpayers a penny, but are all gung ho on jailing people for even small crimes as if that's somehow free.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Not the problem

        We're also talking about a city where 'harm reduction' means keeping people on the street and keeping them on drugs.

        If you suggest any sort of housing either the locals are up in arms 'don't put them here!!' or the activists are up in arms 'this is not suitable, human rights, blah blah!'.

        I think it was in SF where they put out portaloos to stop people pooping in public and they got vandalised. So they stopped.

        I saw an article that said LA (I know, different city) was spending something like 800k for each unit.

        1. Prst. V.Jeltz Silver badge

          Re: Not the problem

          Unit of what ???

          Portaloos?

          Houses for the homeless?

          Theres not much you cant buy for 800k

          1. Anonymous Coward
            Anonymous Coward

            Re: Not the problem

            Housing unit.

            https://www.opb.org/article/2022/02/23/los-angeles-spending-up-to-837000-to-house-single-homeless-person/

          2. jake Silver badge

            Re: Not the problem

            "Theres not much you cant buy for 800k"

            You've obviously never lived in Central California ...

        2. garwhale

          Re: Not the problem

          Must be plenty of office building that are undertenanted due to WFH - see Centre Point. A prefabricated small house for 2-3 does not cost $800 K, more like $100 K or less.

      2. IGotOut Silver badge

        Re: Not the problem

        The US prison service is run as a "for profit" organisation. More prisoners, more profit.

        1. MiguelC Silver badge

          Re: Not the problem

          Yes, for the profit of the companies running them, but it's still the taxpayer that foots the bill.

        2. jake Silver badge

          Re: Not the problem

          Way to turn a very complex issue into a simplistic buzz-phrase. Are you perchance a politician?

      3. jake Silver badge

        Re: Not the problem

        The thing is that San Francisco is paying out far more for each and every homeless person in the city than it would cost to rent that person an apartment[0], pay the utilities, and keep them in food and medical care. Dealing with the homeless (and to a smaller extent, the druggies) has become a major employer in San Francisco.

        [0] Outside city limits, of course ... last time I looked, the cost of apartments in SF was the highest in the nation.

    2. jake Silver badge

      Re: Not the problem

      "The reason police don't deal with low level crime"

      The reason Police in San Francisco don't deal with low-level crime is because they've been told not to. It would seem that the criminal's civil rights in San Francisco outweigh the rights of the people and businesses who are having the crimes committed against them.

      No number of cameras will trump that. Especially not after Carl[0], miscreants with paint and/or sandpaper, and the seagulls destroy the lenses ability to pass light.

      [0] Carl is the name of the fog in SF.

  2. An_Old_Dog Silver badge

    Video Surveillance

    ... is a check-box on an insurance company's audit sheet, but its effectiveness is low. It presumes the police have the time and staff power to develop these cases into something the government is willing and able to prosecute, that the courts are willing and able to hear these cases, and that evil-doers are thinking rationally and that they give a rat's arse.

    Hint: most evil-doers are not thinking rationally (or at all), nor do they give a rat's arse.

  3. Winkypop Silver badge
    Black Helicopters

    Impact on crime: Nil

    Impact on vouyeristic cable TV cop shows: Bonanza!

  4. Lurko

    The name is fitting

    "London Breed" could also be applied to the London breed of politicians here in the UK - who believe that crime will go away if you put up CCTV, use unregulated face recognition software and other such digital tools, buit seem incapable of addressing the root causes of crime, and the ineffectiveness of the justice system as it currently works.

    For our American friends, I can assure you that plastering London and most other British cities with public CCTV (even linking in some large commercial CCTV systems) has made zero meaningful difference to crime rates across the past two decades. You can make things as illegal as you please, the sentences as draconian as you want, your surveillance as all encompassing as you wish, and crime will still occur unless you minimise the drivers of crime, and you rehabilitate convicts as far as that's possible. Some people are irredeemable, but this number should be small. As a consequence of the poor performance of the US justice system, there's around 1.5m people incarcerated in the US, that's a staggeringly expensive burden for taxpayers, and a massive loss of resource to the economy.

    How you minimise the drivers of crime, address social attitudes that make crime acceptable in some communities, and how you rehabilitate convicts are highly contentious and understanding is limited by political polarisation and poor understanding of what works and what doesn't, but those are where London Breed needs to start, not by installing valueless mass surveillance. On the topic of drivers of crime, the illegality and thus profitability of drugs is a major driver, materially compounded by the lack of regulation, knowledge and control. But until society and especially the chattering classes grow up and understands that prohibition stops almost nothing we'll keep having a massive crime problem related to drugs, bith in the US, UK and other countries.

    1. Spanners
      Boffin

      Re: The name is fitting

      "prohibition stops almost nothing"

      It's worse than that. Prohibition creates and increases crime.

      In 1918 USA, how many gangsters made a living from alcohol? How many were doing so 10 years later? It created crimes.

      I would be interested to see how many drug kingpins there are in Portugal right now. Banning things makes them desirable to people. Illegal things are profitable. People get involved in illegal trade and push it.

      Banning stuff does not lower the problem. It makes it bigger and more dangerous.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: The name is fitting

        "I would be interested to see how many drug kingpins there are in Portugal right now."

        Plenty, because it'll be a drugs trafficking route through the EU's non-existent country borders. Much as Canada was a base for organised crime smuggling booze into the US until prohibition ended in 1933.

      2. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: The name is fitting

        Making something legal doesn't negate the harm the thing does.

        Part of the homelessness issue is people can't function when out of their gourd on fentanyl or crack. Lets not ignore the opioid crisis where people started off on legal substances and ended up with their lives being destroyed. This whole 'legalise and destigmatise' approach doesn't help the people living on the street. It just makes the hand wringing lefty types feel happier as what the homeless person is doing is no-longer illegal.

        1. Lurko

          Re: The name is fitting

          I never proposed that legalising something reduced its harm, but the point that the anti-legalisation lobby choose to ignore is that making drugs illegal has patently had no material impact on the availability or use of drugs.

          Anybody who chooses to use drugs has ready routes to access them, whether that's the rich and powerful, middle class partiers, working class joes, teenagers, or the down and outs. Drug control has failed. Completely. And pretending otherwise makes the problem worse, because government has no accurate information on prevalence, no control of shipments, of quality, and by making it illegal they create the circumstances for organised crime to flourish. US (and UK) jails are expensively full of criminals serving sentences for drug related crime, possession, use, supply, violence over drug debt, violence over distribution routes, theft and fraud to pay for drugs. US estimates put the cost of the war on drugs at a trillion dollars - and what is there to show for that? Nothing.

          If society wants to have greater control over drugs, the only way of doing that is legalise and regulate. Anybody who thinks that the way forward involves more enforcement and harsher penalties as the obvious answer to the failure of drug prohibition need only look at the Philippines, where the police were given free rein to shoot drug dealers - nine years and thousands of deaths later and drugs are still a problem.

          If somebody wants to consume drugs - however unwisely and even in excess - why does society try to stop them? We don't stop people eating or drinking themselves to death, and excess deaths from those last two are significantly larger than the toll from drugs.

          1. Anonymous Coward
            Anonymous Coward

            Re: The name is fitting

            "legalise and regulate"

            They are currently regulated, by being illegal. As I said, making it legal doesn't change the harm. You basically contradicted your opening point. Some hot shot banker doing nose candy is either going to grow out of it OR crash and burn.

            Even if all drugs are legal they are still non-zero cost. Alcohol is legal in the US, UK and Europe yet people end up destitute on the streets due to that cos they have to spend money to get booze.

            The difference between not wanting people to drink or drug themselves to death vs not stopping fatties being fatties and stuffing their faces with big macs and shakes is that making people fat is ungodly profitable, doesn't normally lead to the fatties being jobless and homeless AND best of all the pharma industry can make good money selling fatties medication to keep them alive or treating them for related illnesses and charging their insurance through the nose.

            Drunks and junkies are not profitable in the same way. Similar to smoking. The illnesses that smokers got after years of puffing away were generally not something you can live with. Pfizer can't sell you a drug that negates lung cancer but they can sell you stuff to lower your blood pressure, cholesterol and help your diabeetus and they know you'll be taking them for YEARS.

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    What an idiot.

    Everyone knows drones and cameras will do nothing, without AI.

    Hasn't she heard of synergies?

    1. david 12 Silver badge

      Fortunately, (if you read the article instead of just the headline), she isn't proposing that "drones and cameras can cure city's crime woes". She's proposing that policing will cure the city's crime problems, and she's suggesting a paper-work-reduction method for increasing effective police presence.

      And it is well known that observation and policing do reduce crime (ignorant people sometimes confuse policing and punishment, but they are ignorant: policing is not the same as revenge).

      Note: CCTV is not observation and policing: for it to have any effect, somebody has to watch the CCTV, and react in real time. At worst, just recording pictures of people in hoodies has no effect at all. At best, any introduction of time-lag between action and reaction reduces the effectiveness of policing to near-zero.

  6. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    San Francisco's mayor, London Breed

    I'm confused.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: San Francisco's mayor, London Breed

      It's certainly an unusual name. Good if you wanted to start a line of hipster clothing....

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: San Francisco's mayor, London Breed

      It's simple - she is the true Cockney Queen, born within the sound of Bow Bells (or it's SF equivalent, born in the Western Addition housing projects).

      1. jake Silver badge

        Re: San Francisco's mayor, London Breed

        The SF equivalent to St Mary-le-Bow would be Glide Memorial, in the Tenderloin.

  7. Sceptic Tank Silver badge
    Terminator

    Free Fran Sancisco (FFS abbreviated)

    I think they should do what Detroit did and get RoboCop.

    Anyway – fishing for something intelligent to contribute here. Would extra security cameras on the public buildings not be somewhat more cost effective? You can hire some of the homeless people to monitor the monitors. They can walk to work. Israel may have some used security cameras on offer fairly soon, I think. (Replaced with squads of soldiers running up and down a stretch of border daily under the watchful eye of a bad tempered staff sergeant)

  8. Gene Cash Silver badge

    Possibly relevant

    https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/06/how-san-francisco-became-failed-city/661199/

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Possibly relevant

      Wow, the Atlantic being critical of Boudin and other SF leaders.

      "The city government says it’s trying to help. But from the outside, what it looks like is young people being eased into death on the sidewalk, surrounded by half-eaten boxed lunches."

      Pretty much.

      "leaving the car empty and the doors unlocked so thieves would at least quit breaking my windows"

      "Once, when I was walking and a guy tore my jacket off my back and sprinted away with it, I didn’t even shout for help"

      "The normal thing to do then was to yell, to try to get help—even, dare I say it, from a police officer—but this felt somehow lame and maybe racist."

      So the author, in their attempt to be 'good' is, albeit very small, a part of the problem. They elected Boudin as they thought using the police to deal with crime was racist, so crime went unchecked.

  9. teebie

    "would see police given powers to use drones to track suspects or monitor for illegal activity"

    One of these would be much more reasonable than the other.

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