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The Nov. 18 story in The San Diego Union-Tribune about efforts to make the city’s landmark 2022 surveillance oversight law more workable showed both privacy advocates and city officials agreed the law has many flaws. It required that in its first year, a new Privacy Advisory Board complete a staggering task: evaluating the impact on the community of each of the 300-plus surveillance technologies the city uses. In July, when the City Council voted to extend the utterly unrealistic deadline by three years, The San Diego Union-Tribune Editorial Board expressed relief that rejected calls from police ers to kill the law and go back to the old unregulated days. “This suggests a constructive mend-it-don’t-end-it approach,” we wrote.
Four months later, such optimism is hard to muster. The agreement from both sides that the law is flawed can’t hide the fact they are far, far apart.
We believe that Mayor Todd Gloria and Police Chief David Nisleit are on solid ground when they say that surveillance technologies that are mundane and straightforward — fingerprint scanners are a good example — should get far less review than more advanced types. Though city officials won’t necessarily make this point in unvarnished fashion, they also question whether there is a whiff of the “de-policing” movement coming from the privacy camp. The idea that license-plate scanners — an extremely powerful tool to deter vehicle thefts — are part of a slippery slope to an authoritarian state is hard to swallow. Few San Diegans are likely to agree.
But we also believe that privacy advocates are on solid ground when they say they have faced some responses from city and police officials that reflect an unstated resolve to block most meaningful oversight of surveillance. In a commentary the U-T published last month, activist Seth Hall detailed the city’s failure to come forward with an accurate inventory of its existing surveillance technologies, as the 2022 law requires. This history is telling. So is the fact that one of the 16 recommendations that city officials unveiled this month would shorten the amount of time that an already time-challenged board has to review a particular technology from 90 to 60 days. So is the fact that the push for a privacy ordinance began with the revelation that police had used surveillance tools in “smart streetlights” installed in 2017 without telling the public. A neutral observer could readily conclude that the strongest voices at City Hall want the privacy board to mostly be a rubber stamp.
This gap between the two camps is daunting. San Diegans would benefit from having a third voice emerge, someone who agreed with this fundamental premise: It is baffling for the city to set up a privacy board only to largely ignore its counsel. Such a leader would be someone who acknowledged the scars left by years of overt racial disparities in policing both locally and nationally — but who also believed that smart use of technology can be a force multiplier keeping people safe in an era in which police officers are hard to find and to retain. Though there are several possibilities, one obvious candidate is City Council President Sean Elo-Rivera.
Someone needs to step up or mutual allegations of bad faith will keep growing. Finding common ground will be elusive. But it’s too soon — at least for now — to assume it will be impossible.
