Readers of this blog know that I don’t have a very high opinion of the San Francisco Chronicle. They’re biased against police, oblivious to peoples’ concerns about crime, and their reporters show a shockingly immature understanding of the great social issues that impact us. I sometimes wonder why I continue to subscribe. I guess it’s just habit.
Their latest imbecility was the lead editorial on Sunday. In the print newspaper itself, it was headlined “Don’t allow surveillance state”. Online, they retitled it “Anger of S.F. property crimes isn’t worth throwing away our property rights”.
The editorial came out hard against allowing the police to utilize, in real time, hundreds of high-definition, privately owned security cameras around town that SFPD would love to use to investigate crime.
I should think any law-abiding citizen would be in favor of that. Who’s against investigating crime and identifying perps? I personally couldn’t care less how many security cameras I appear on without my knowledge. I don’t break the law. (Well, I occasionally jaywalk.) I have nothing to worry about. But a lot of bad people do break the law. They storm stores and steal merchandise, they mug pedestrians, they kill people with their guns, they deal drugs in the open, they are making our cities unlivable. We want them off the street—and if the cops have a way of doing that, why would any decent person try to stop them?
But here’s the San Francisco Chronicle, once again going against common sense and public safety and advancing their tired progressive arguments. “We have concerns” about police use of the cameras, they intone, using the Papal “We.” And what are those concerns? “The potential privacy infringements that could accompany expansive live monitoring.”
I suppose we should thank the Chronicle for being so concerned about our privacy. But I care less about my privacy than I do about my safety and that of my neighbors; and like I said above, I don’t give a hoot about security cameras. The more, the better.
This is so cynical and hypocritical of the Chronicle. When one of their photographers was assaulted and robbed at gunpoint in Oakland during the George Floyd riot downtown, the Chronicle wasted no time in contacting the police. A similar incident last year, in which thieves attempting to steal the equipment of an NBC News crew downtown were caught on surveillance cameras.
That’s the Chronicle for you. If I had a nickel for every anti public-safety slur that’s appeared in the Chronicle, I’d be a millionaire. Cops are bad, the paper implies day in and day out. They’re racists and white supremacists. They run amok, committing violence against people of color. They need to be controlled, the more tightly, the better. You can’t trust cops. Nearly every article about Oakland that Sarah Ravani, who covers the East Bay, writes contains some version of this Big Lie. The paper refers to “police violence” and “brutality” the way they talk about the fog: like it’s an everyday occurrence when, in fact, it’s incredibly rare to the point of non-existence.
I reported on surveillance cameras a few months ago, when it was unclear whether or not OPD would be allowed to access cameras that were privately held (for instance, by stores or Caltrans). Some “progressive” groups predictably were against it. The Fife-Bas-Kaplan-Thao City Council voted to make it much harder for OPD to use the cameras. Their new regulation demands that “the community assess whether the surveillance technology has been effective.”
Now, does that make sense? Who is “the community”? It’s the activists who have connections to progressives in government. They’re much further to the left than most of us, and they have a far higher tolerance of crime than we do. For them, crime is simply part of the cost of imposing their vision of “social justice” upon Oakland. They don’t like preventing or solving crime because it gets in the way of their radical policies; this is also why they want to defund the police. And this is “the community” that’s supposed to assess the cameras’ effectiveness?!? Why not just let Cat Brooks do it?
The new City Council regulation even went so far as to require OPD to identify “the race of each person that was subject to the technology’s use,” as if that has anything to do with public safety. But, of course, race is at the center of nearly everything this City Council does. When I say the City Council is obsessed with race, I mean it literally. It’s an unhealthy, unwholesome fixation that has unfortunate consequences on everybody, because it reduces every problem, every issue to being merely a subset of racial politics.
So, to the San Francisco Chronicle, I say, keep your “concerns” to yourself. You’re not part of the solution. You’re part of the problem.
BREAKING: Late yesterday a compromise was reached in San Francisco between Mayor Breed and the Board of Supervisors. SFPD will be able to utilize the surveillance cameras in real time for a trial period of one year, but only under carefully defined circumstances. This is a step forward, of a limited nature, but still…it’s better than nothing.
Steve Heimoff