You walk into the meeting and, at the entrance, use your phone to scan a code displayed on a placard. It warps you to a website where you select your language — suppose that’s Brazilian Portuguese — and presto! A live transcription of the meeting, now in Portuguese, begins flowing on your screen. You can keep reading the translated dialogue or plug in your headphones so a robotic voice can read it to you.

San Jose, Millbrae and other cities are experimenting with this artificial intelligence-powered software to make local government more accessible through real-time translation. Napa County, the most recent to try it out, launched the service this week.

“I don’t think we can afford not to do it, given the needs of our population,” said Millbrae Mayor Anders Fung, the first Asian American immigrant to hold that office. About one in five Millbrae residents is not proficient in English, according to U.S. Census data.

“We need to serve the people in a way they could understand,” Fung said.

The technology has the potential to bridge communication gaps in San Francisco, where nearly 147,000 residents are estimated to be less than proficient in English. Members of the public can struggle to access city-provided human interpreters, who verbally translate what’s said during public meetings. But officials say they have no plan to introduce this service, out of concerns about its accuracy and cultural competency. Local community groups share those concerns, but also say they are interested in the technology’s potential to make public meetings more accessible.

Neither human nor machine is flawless. Staff from those local groups said that city-provided interpreters are not always culturally competent or accurate. And the San Francisco Public Press’ test of AI-translation software revealed numerous shortcomings — like translating “budget” into “butter” when the speaker pronounced it poorly — though overall the product worked.

Tech company Wordly, based in Los Altos, launched its AI-powered translation service in 2019 and initially marketed it to industry conferences and companies doing global business. But the company quickly found one of its fastest-growing uses in local governments, including in the Bay Area, said Dave Deasy, chief marketing manager. The product can translate 58 languages, including Arabic, Italian, Russian and Japanese.

Companies offering similar AI-powered real-time translation products for meetings and events include Interprefy, based in Switzerland, and KUDO, in New York. Both launched their products more recently than Wordly, which appears to lead in adoption by local governments.

Helping officials talk with each other, residents

Before embracing Wordly, Millbrae provided interpreters at public meetings to people who requested them in advance — San Francisco has a similar policy. But officials realized a year ago that they needed the AI-based tool, Mayor Fung said, when an attendee made a public comment in Mandarin. Fung, who was not mayor at the time, said he was the only councilmember who understood the attendee because no one had booked a Chinese-to-English interpreter.

By using Wordly, Millbrae residents can skip that step.

“The beauty of our product is that it’s on demand and you don’t have to plan ahead,” Deasy said.

In the city of Sunnyvale, the newly formed Human Relations Commission uses Wordly, enabling monolingual Spanish- and English-speaking commissioners to deliberate more easily and quickly.

“This creates a much smoother dialogue than using live interpreters,” city spokesperson Jennifer Garnett said.

San Jose began using Wordly for its city council and committee meetings in April. A month after launch, City Clerk Toni J. Taber said public feedback was positive and the city planned to extend its use to other departments, according to news publication Government Technology.

In Modesto, officials made initial plans during the COVID-19 pandemic to offer Spanish subtitle service, but adopted Wordly in 2022 instead in hopes that it would help engage communities that spoke other languages.

Wordly says on its website that it is less expensive than human interpretation, in part because it translates dozens of languages; providing that service by conventional means would require hiring several people. Reports from some cities support this. San Jose budgeted $400,000 per year for eight interpreters. After the city adopted Wordly, the annual cost fell to $82,000, the San José Spotlight reported. In Gilroy, a two-hour meeting used to require two interpreters and cost at least $500, but using Wordly has dropped that cost to $300.

Wordly offers various subscription plans, with the hourly price of translation ranging from roughly $100 to $300.

Accuracy problems common with AI

The Public Press conducted a 15-minute trial of Wordly, using it to listen to a Cantonese version of a Modesto City Council meeting about the city budget. Overall, the product achieved its goal of accurately reflecting the discussion about this complex topic, including when exchanges were dense with numbers.

But initial translation accuracy was low, with words out of context and incorrectly sequenced in a manner more akin to English than Chinese. As a speaker kept talking, Wordly overwrote its prior output with a more accurate translation. For example, in a discussion about the city’s budget, Wordly translated someone’s statement about cars as a reference to “marine” vehicles, like boats, before quickly correcting itself.

Translations were often too literal. When a councilmember said, “So moved” — a procedural declaration about a government’s item of business — Wordly mistranslated it as “所以感动” which means “so (emotionally) touching.” When a speaker presented financial projections and referred to a square visual element in a table of figures, Wordly sometimes called the element a physical box.

Wordly lets users click on translated sentences to read them in the original language. That could help some people piece together a speaker’s meaning during or after a public meeting.

When users have Wordly speak the translated text, the audio stops if the phone’s screen turns off. That could vex less tech-savvy people whose screens automatically time out.

SF government, community skeptical

San Francisco officials said they were open to using AI but did not have plans to adopt Wordly or a similar tool.

“We believe that there’s no better interpreter and translator than the human, who can capture the essence and cultural nuances in language better than any type of machine translation,” said Jorge Rivas, executive director of the Office of Civic Engagement and Immigrant Affairs, which oversees implementation of the city’s language policy.

Staff at various community groups told the Public Press they were interested in technology that would make public meetings more accessible in more languages, but they expressed general concern about AI products. Some declined to comment on the record about Wordly because they had not tried it.

Sandy Jiang, a community organizer at the Chinatown Community Development Center, said she worried about Wordly’s accuracy and usability, especially for seniors who struggle with smartphones. She often helps residents by interpreting their comments into English during public meetings.

High-quality translation and interpretation require more than word-for-word replacement, and benefit from cultural competence, Jiang said. In Cantonese, for example, the name for Grant Avenue isn’t a direct translation, which would be 格蘭特大道. Instead, the Chinese community knows it as 都板街, which translates to Dupont Street, its name before the 1906 earthquake. And while “Chinatown” is generally translated as 唐人街, San Francisco locals better recognize it as 華埠, which means “Chinese wharf.”

Here, Wordly might actually have an edge over some human interpreters. Its translations can incorporate local terms for people, places or organizations that a client city specifies, Deasy said, as well as block profanity and other unwanted language. Jiang and other sources said they had witnessed city-provided interpreters use local terminology that was not culturally competent.

And while Wordly would not be able to clarify a speaker’s meaning with them in real time, some human interpreters also fail to provide that service. Members of the public have frequently felt misrepresented during public comment, said Vanessa Bohm, director of family wellness and health promotion programs at the Central American Resource Center, a nonprofit serving the Bay Area Latino community.

Bohm also expressed concern that AI tools could reduce demand for good interpreters and leave them with less work.

Bohm and Jiang both said that a service like Wordly could be a backup when human interpretation was unavailable, but that top-shelf interpretation should always be the priority.

“Interpretation means for the person to understand what you are talking about,” Jiang said. “The important part of providing interpretation is not just having a service, [it] is actually having the service that works.”

The post As Bay Area Cities Adopt Real-Time AI Translation for Public Meetings, SF Abstains appeared first on San Francisco Public Press.

The way the system is designed prevents many people from applying, including those who live in informal housing arrangements, those who do not speak English and those who lack digital proficiency, according to staff at local organizations helping tenants and landlords file applications. The groups are scheduled to hold a press conference at noon today to share their grievances about the rent-relief program.

“The system itself is not helping them,” said Rita Lui, housing counselor at the Chinatown Community Development Center. “It’s discouraging them.”

Lui and others recounted stories of their Asian and Latino clients, many of them low-income workers who have accumulated crippling rent debt. Some have decided to leave San Francisco now rather than wait until the state’s eviction protections lift in July.

“A lot of the people who lost their jobs work in service industries, like restaurants or hotels,” Lui said. “When you don’t speak English, there’s not a lot of work you can do.” More than half the people working in the local leisure and hospitality industry, which includes bars, restaurants and hotels, lost their jobs at the start of the pandemic — the workforce in the San Francisco Metropolitan Area, which includes San Mateo County, fell from 139,000 in March last year to 62,900 people the following month.

“They go back to Mexico,” said Dairo Romero, community initiatives manager at the Mission Economic Development Agency, referring to tenants who were struggling with housing costs. “They came here to just work hard and go back to their country; they don’t want to have $10,000 in debt.”

Program excludes informal housing arrangements

The state’s program, which opened March 15, partially reimburses selected landlords for the rent debts tenants have not paid because of COVID-19 hardships. It also reimburses tenants for their utility costs.

Applicants must upload documentation proving their housing situations for the state’s web portal to accept their applications. This is the source of much of the trouble, housing counselors say.

“The big problem with San Francisco and for the Latino population is that the state doesn’t consider the subtenants,” Romero said. “If they are a subtenant, they cannot apply.”

Subtenants do not possess lease agreements, Romero said. Instead, they give monthly rent payments to the “master tenant,” whose name is on the lease and who delivers the household’s total rent to the landlord. That also means the master tenant incurs rent debt on the subtenant’s behalf, and this can spur the master tenant to harass and threaten the subtenant to pay up.

Romero said the subtenant has to persuade the master tenant to apply for the state aid on their behalf. He is helping his clients initiate those conversations.

Other people who lack leases include those living in some unpermitted accessory dwelling units, known as “granny flats” or in-law units, Lui said. Her clients have had trouble applying for utility reimbursements through the state program, which requires the tenant’s name be on the bill.

“In an illegal basement unit, the landlord lives upstairs and the tenant lives downstairs. So of course the bill is in the landlord’s name,” Lui said.

Tenants applying without the cooperation of their landlords can get reimbursed for up to 25% of their rent debts, preventing them from being evicted for nonpayment during the months covered by the state’s eviction moratorium. But for tenants to have 100% of their rent debts forgiven, their landlords must participate in the application process.

Romero said landlords in some informal housing arrangements have refused to apply for the state funds. They would rather lose money than tell the government they earned rental income, out of fear that they’ll draw attention from the Internal Revenue Service.

Russ Heimerich, a spokesman for the state’s rent-relief program, said that people in some informal housing situations might qualify for the program. “We’re examining those on a case-by-case basis and working with such applicants,” he said.

Heimerich said that the state might also cover utility bills in some informal housing situations. “We would work with the utility provider and the household to see what’s possible, and would work directly with the utility provider to see what is owed,” he said.

Instructions lost in translation

Many of Lui’s clients speak Chinese and little or no English.

When her clients first encountered the state website’s instructions page, they met a wall of indecipherable English, Lui said. A button in the web browser’s upper-right corner let them use Google Translate to convert the page to Chinese. But Lui said the translation made the instructions harder to understand.

“When I read the Chinese translation, I got confused,” Lui said. “I don’t know what they’re asking me to provide.”

For example, there was a button that, in English, invited the “returning applicant” to resume an application from a previous web session. “In Chinese, it’s ‘returning to your country applicant,’” Lui said, which doesn’t make sense.

To register and begin the application process, users must select where they live in the state. But this registration page does not have a Google Translate button.

“It’s scary. You see this map and you don’t know what’s going on,” Lui said. “They don’t know what they’re asking them for.”

Lui tried calling the assistance hotline provided on the website. The automated voice gave directions in English — including the prompt to press a particular number on the keypad to receive instructions in Cantonese.

“The program has so many defects, in terms of language access,” Lui said. “It’s challenging. We try to overcome, but I think they can do a better job in designing the program so that more tenants are encouraged to apply.”

No email address? No financial aid.

Lui and Romero both said the program is difficult for people who aren’t comfortable with technology.

Applicants need to know how to use email. “That is a problem for seniors or people who don’t check the emails,” Romero said.

“If the landlord applies, tenants will get notified. But tenants who don’t have an email address, they won’t get notified,” Lui said. Even after she and her colleagues set up email accounts for their clients, the application process stalls if people don’t monitor their email.

Landlords and tenants also must provide digital copies of all documents, which can require scanning paper files and then locating them on a computer’s hard drive for upload to the web — a complex procedure for people who don’t stare at a screen for a living.

Groups air grievances

Sixteen community organizations in San Francisco plan to convene a remote press conference today to spotlight the “discriminatory barriers that particularly impact immigrants and seniors” seeking rent debt relief, according to a press release.

Prior to the press conference, the groups sent a letter of grievances and requests to modify the program to Geoffrey Ross, deputy director of the California Department of Housing and Community Development.

“Tens of thousands of tenants in San Francisco are presently facing a looming threat of eviction because of severe financial hardship as a result of the COVID 19 crisis,” they wrote in the letter. “Fair, equitable, and barrier free access to the state’s rental assistance program is therefore essential to prevent evictions not only in our city but across the state.”

The groups said that “more than a dozen elements” of the application process were problematic. They demanded that the state professionally translate all instructions and application materials, improve the assistance hotline and provide a better process for people to apply with paper documents.

Heimerich, the spokesman for the state’s rent-relief program, said he could not comment on the groups’ demands because he had not yet seen their letter.

“We’ve been working with stakeholder groups to learn where the weaknesses are in the system,” Heimerich said, adding that the state’s primary goal had been to get the program up and running.

“We’ve only been up since March 15, and we expect we’ll make additional changes as we hear from stakeholders,” he said.

The post State’s Rent-Relief Program Neglects Vulnerable Communities, Groups Say appeared first on San Francisco Public Press.

“All of the technical systems that we build are things to support, or I guess — I hate to use this word — to disrupt the ways that people do live their lives,” Alkhatib said. “That’s not to say that technology is a bad thing or anything like that, but that it exists in society, and that it acts on society in these ways.”

The riot at the Capitol made it painfully evident that online discourse can and does have real-life consequences. But that has always been true, Alkhatib said, and pretending otherwise is a luxury only the privileged can afford to indulge in.

“The view that things that happen on the internet are all sandboxed and sort of like games, or sort of playful, inconsequential things, is the sort of thing that one says when they are insulated from the reality of consequences,” he said.

Alkhatib said the technology, rules and algorithms that govern online platforms — including safeguards against abuse or violence — are not neutral. 

“What ends up happening is that the groups of people who already have power end up using those bureaucratic institutions and those structures to perpetuate violence,” he said, likening platform rule enforcement to real-life law enforcement, with the same racial and social biases.

“Unless you are building this specifically with the marginalized and vulnerable groups, it’s hard to build any system like this that does anything but further oppress people who are already under the thumb of various other structures and various other bureaucracies and powers,” he said.

He also said he hopes users of these platforms will get more comfortable demanding the changes that they want to see and advocating for improvements, like residents might petition a city to fix a pothole or other quality of life problem.

“We don’t need computer science degrees or philosophy degrees or any of that stuff to be able to say, you know, ‘Twitter shouldn’t run this way,’” Alkhatib said. “‘This is not working for us and it’s causing harm for us. And the fact that I am a human being is enough to entitle me to have a say in how my life is mediated and run.’”

The post Social Media Content Moderation Is Not Neutral, USF Researcher Says appeared first on San Francisco Public Press.

A series of emails and neighborhood flyers obtained by the Public Press show alliances being formed between police and residents of Woodward, Albion, Camp, Poplar, and Guerrero streets in the Mission.

The collaborations have emerged after residents reached out to Mission Station for assistance in managing tents, drug use and trash on their streets. In response, the station’s designated homeless outreach officers have been guiding residents through several steps to make their streets safer — including installing surveillance cameras, bright outdoor lights and trimming trees and bushes.

Residents have been asked to stick blank post-it notes in their windows to show their interest in participating in neighborhood meetings with the police. A newly formed group, Woodward Street Safe for All, distributed a flyer advising neighbors to “Put a post-it note in your front window to let us know you support this safe-for-everyone initiative. We will see it. No one will know what it means but us.”

On Tuesday, at least half a dozen post-it notes were visible in the windows of houses along Woodward Street.

The call was the same several blocks away on Albion and Camp streets, where a flyer made the rounds in the days before Thanksgiving. On Tuesday, post-it notes were stuck to windows of several houses along both streets.

A police spokesperson said the department has no knowledge about the origins of those post-it notes.

The movement appears to be spreading. A resident of Collingwood Street in the Castro, who spoke with the Public Press on the condition of anonymity due to fear of retaliation from neighbors, said that last week, two Mission Station-based police officers and several people who live along his street knocked on his door, inviting him to a neighborhood meeting to discuss safety. He declined, and voiced his opposition to plans to increase surveillance and add bright lights outside his windows. In the days since, he has received several angry messages from neighbors on social media.

In the Mission, efforts to encourage residents to install surveillance cameras appear to involve, at a minimum, Homeless Outreach Officer John Cathey and his partner, Officer Robert Clendenen. In an email to a Woodward Street resident in September, Cathey said, “If the people on Woodward genuinely want this to end and I believe they do, if they are 100% committed, we can show them how to do this as a team and they’ll be done with this wash rinse and repeat way of life.”

A key element of reducing neighborhood complaints, Cathey said in the same email, is security cameras. He said he and Clendenen had arrested more than 100 people at Mission encampments, many of whom he alleges were caught on video committing a crime.

Use of Ring Surveillance cameras encouraged

The type of security camera recommended is specific. A Woodward resident reported that at a November meeting at the corner of 26th and Poplar streets, Cathey said he supports “Ring security cameras installed at as many houses as possible. If every inch of the block has eyes on it,” he said, crime and trash dumping will end.

SFPD spokesperson Officer Tiffany Hang said the department does not promote any specific brand of camera, but did acknowledge that “Surveillance cameras have been extremely helpful in our investigations.”

Those videos can provide key material for officers to identify suspects and press charges, but Ring cameras come with their share of controversy. The cameras are developed by Amazon and are aggressively targeted to law enforcement agencies as a crime deterrent.

The Ring app, called Neighbors, comes with a feature that allows the camera’s owner to share surveillance footage with police. According to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Amazon partners with more than 1,300 law enforcement agencies across the country. According to a map provided by Amazon, SFPD does not have an active partnership with Neighbors, though they can request video footage from Ring camera owners outside of the app.

Ring was used frequently by law enforcement agencies nationwide during Black Lives Matter protests, spawning concern from the EFF.

“These partnerships allow police to have a general idea of the location of every Ring camera in town, and to make batch-requests for footage via email to every resident with a camera within an area of interest to police—potentially giving police a one-step process for requesting footage of protests to identify protesters,” EFF wrote on its website in June.

This isn’t the first time the San Francisco Police Department has depended on access to privately owned surveillance cameras. In May and June, when protests raged around the country in the wake of several instances of police violence, SFPD requested access to a large private surveillance network in Union Square, installed by a tech executive.

Ring cameras, however, are much more widespread across the city. The platform that accompanies the camera makes it easy to share, with neighbors or the police. With just a couple clicks in an app, SFPD could gain a new level of access to our streets with each camera installed.

The post Police Pushing Amazon Surveillance Cameras for Mission District Residents appeared first on San Francisco Public Press.

The company rousted eight people in the middle of the night on Sept. 10, and – while city officials have largely remained silent – the action didn’t sit well with TechCrunch, which is renting Non Plus Ultra’s SVN West event space at Market Street and South Van Ness Avenue.

Non Plus Ultra hired an independent cleaning crew to dispose of eight people’s tents and belongings along the back of SVN West. During the middle-of-the-night sweep, people lost survival gear, family ashes, musical instruments and thousands of dollars in cash.

Many city departments have not made statements in response to the incident, which the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights called “blatantly illegal.” The mayor’s office, the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing, the Healthy Streets Operation Center, the San Francisco Police Department and the city attorney’s office did not respond to repeated requests for comment.

TechCrunch — which is renting SVN West from Non Plus Ultra this week for its Disrupt conference — released a statement criticizing the decision to seize people’s belongings and saying it is cutting ties with Non Plus Ultra.

“This is absolutely unacceptable, and we’re working to take immediate action,” wrote TechCrunch Editor in Chief Matthew Panzarino and TechCrunch Director of Operations Joey Hinson in a blog post responding to the outcry over the incident. “We will no longer be working with Non Plus Ultra at any of their venues in San Francisco for any TechCrunch event in the future.”

Supervisor Matt Haney, whose district encompasses SVN West and the street where the sweep took place, did respond. He said that after reading the original article on the sweep in the San Francisco Public Press, he reached out to Non Plus Ultra to discuss the issue. The event company operates out of several buildings in Haney’s district, including the San Francisco Mint, which is leased to them by the city.

“I said ‘Hey, this sounds terrible to me, and unacceptable. What happened here, and what are you going to do?’” he said. 

Non Plus Ultra has yet to make any public statements about its role in the sweep, though TechCrunch writes that the event company will be working with Community Housing Partnership and DISH, a supportive housing program, to “support the homeless community on 12th Street.”

Haney also contacted Capt. Edward Del Carlo, who heads SFPD’s Southern Station.

“It’s pretty shocking that the police were there and didn’t intervene,” he said, referencing the fact that police were called to the scene and took no steps to prevent the theft. Two witnesses allege that police even participated in the sweep, unzipping tents and telling people to leave. “We should have a responsibility to prevent those types of conflicts on our streets,” Haney said. “If people’s things are being stolen,” he added, the police “should be stopping that, and they should be stopping violence as well. It sounds like there were people hurt in the course of this, which is awful and unacceptable.”

District Attorney Chesa Boudin said he is also keeping an eye on the situation.

“I am concerned about the recent unauthorized homeless sweeps as well as reports that police officers were on scene but did not intervene to prevent destruction of personal property,” he said. “Unhoused people have the same rights to their property as anyone else — and they are especially vulnerable to the seizure of their personal belongings. We must stop the dehumanization of our unhoused neighbors.”

Boudin called for long-lasting solutions to poverty, adding, “Sweeps like this one are not only inhumane, but approach our housing crisis as if it were a game of whack-a-mole rather than by seeking systemic change.”

Haney, who pushed for the opening of hotel rooms for unhoused people early in the pandemic, said the safety of homeless encampments goes beyond this single incident.  “I believe strongly that no one should be living on our streets during a pandemic,” he said.

He’s also expressed concern about copycat sweeps. “The Department of Homelessness and the Mayor’s Office need to give some guidance on clarifying for people that they can’t do this.”

The post TechCrunch Breaks With Event Company Over Homeless Sweep appeared first on San Francisco Public Press.

Non Plus Ultra, a company providing event space for TechCrunch’s Disrupt, an influential trade show for technology startups that began yesterday and typically draws thousands of attendees, conducted an independent sweep of a homeless tent encampment outside one of its San Francisco locations last week.

The incident, which was not sanctioned by the city, occurred early on Thursday, Sept. 10, behind a former Honda dealership on Market Street that has been converted into a Non Plus Ultra event space. The middle-of-the-night sweep displaced eight people, according to a nearby shelter resident who was friends with many of the camp residents.

A crew disposed of everyone’s belongings, taking them away in unmarked trucks. The sweep was observed by San Francisco Police Department officers, who did not attempt to prevent the sweep, according to several witnesses at the scene. Police confirmed that officers were sent to the scene, but said they did not talk to anyone, and no incident report was made.

“TechCrunch did not take part in or request” the sweep, said Editor in Chief Matthew Panzarino in an emailed statement noting that the company took the matter “very seriously.” He added, “We were not consulted on or informed of this action, which we would never condone.”

San Francisco’s practice of sweeping tent encampments ceased in March, when the city’s Healthy Streets Operation Team announced it would pause the seizure of tents and belongings due to the pandemic. As a result, the community that grew along 12th Street had been there for months.

“I’ve been here since March 18 in this very frigging spot,” said Jeffery McLemore, one of the residents whose belongings were seized. “They took everything. They didn’t leave not one thing.”

Tori Larson of the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights, who is investigating the case, called the sweep “blatantly illegal.”

“You have a right to your belongings,” Larson said. “It is complicated by the fact that it was a private party, but it was a crime. You cannot take people’s stuff. There can certainly be charges pressed against the company.”

Non Plus Ultra signed a lease on the old car dealership and converted it into an event space in 2018, christening it SVN West. This week, the site is being used to host TechCrunch’s Disrupt conference, which features a “Startup Battlefield” where new companies compete for a $100,000 prize. Although Disrupt will be screened virtually, the event space is being used as a filming stage for the event. Tickets to Disrupt range from $75 to $545.

The sweep was conducted because the tents were abandoned, blocking the sidewalk at the rear of the building, and constituted a “serious health, safety, and fire hazard,” Non Plus Ultra said in an email to the San Francisco Public Press.

A few days before the sweep, Jonathan Huerta, a resident of the Civic Center Navigation Center, located across the street from the SVN West, witnessed Peter Glikshtern, a partner at Non Plus Ultra, approach the group to give them a warning that they would have to move. Huerta said the camp residents agreed, but asked that he go through the city, in the hope that they’d be connected to services or given hotel vouchers. They began to clean up the camp in preparation for the city coming by, getting rid of extraneous stuff and retaining only what was valuable.

Lost trumpet, violins, cash

They weren’t prepared for the middle-of-the-night sweep by a private company. When asked why the job was conducted after midnight, Glikshtern said. “It was just the easiest, most convenient time to do it.”

During the sweep, people lost everything. Huerta said the tents contained money from stimulus and unemployment checks, survival gear and personal items. One man lost a jacket his father had given him. Another, a sentimental notebook. Another, an urn containing his father’s ashes. Huerta lost materials he’d been storing at the camp to fix his truck.

“They all had masks on, and a whole bully effect,” Huerta said of the crew. “They walked up to tents, opened them, and started taking people’s stuff.”

McLemore said he lost two violins that belonged to his daughter, a trumpet, a moped, high-end auto parts and $11,000 in jobless benefit money that he’d kept out of the bank due to distrust of financial institutions.

Huerta said the encampment residents were frantic, trying to reclaim their belongings. Both McLemore and Huerta said Glikshtern started fighting with one of the residents during the sweep, and had him in a chokehold.

“There was a fight and I got hit in the head with a pipe, which wasn’t fun,” Glikshtern said. He didn’t expand on the comment about the chokehold.

Someone called police for assistance. “Officers arrived on scene and did not observe a fight nor did any person flag the officers down for any disturbance or other incident,” said San Francisco Police Department spokesman Robert Rueca. “There was no party that spoke to the police who arrived on scene.”

Huerta and McLemore said that’s not the case. They both said officers pulled Glikshtern aside when police showed up. Glikshtern confirmed he was searched, saying a false call had been made stating he had a gun. All told, he said, police showed up three times during the operation.

After the police failed to find a gun on Glikshtern, they let him go. “The next thing I know [the police officers] are walking with him, knocking on tents telling everyone they have to leave,” Huerta said. “Within 30 minutes, everything was gone.”

Two Facebook Live videos of the event posted at 12:14 a.m. corroborated many of Huerta and McLemore’s statements. In them, workers can be seen filling two unmarked trucks with mattresses, tents, bicycles and bags.

“These people are not DPW, they are stealing these homeless people’s stuff,” the video’s narrator, Mary Mac Bortolussi, can be heard saying. “There’s no way these people can get their stuff back. The police are just allowing these men to confiscate all these homeless people’s belongings.” 

One truck left the scene. The second drove into the back of SVN West with people’s belongings inside. In the final minutes of Bortolussi’s second Facebook live video, Glikshtern can be seen high-fiving the workers after the job was done.

“It was trash, so it was taken to the dump,” Glikshtern said when asked where the items were taken.

Complaints to city agencies

Non Plus Ultra has defended the sweep, saying, “The tents were only removed after reaching out to DPW over 50 times, SFPD non-emergency a number of times.” In addition to health and safety concerns, the company said they needed to power wash the sidewalks and paint over graffiti, per city requirements.

A search of data from 311, the city’s all-purpose hotline, turned up a handful of complaints about the encampment over the last several months. The city did respond to some of those. Although sweeps paused during the pandemic, crews from Public Works are still being deployed to encampments to clean around the tents.

On July 11, a complaint over the encampment was resolved with the note “status is case transferred – area was cleaned around the encampment; referred to the police dept.”

Two reports of graffiti on Non Plus Ultra’s building at 10 South Van Ness Ave. — one on Aug. 21, and a second on Sept. 2 — were marked resolved by the city, with the note “During the shelter-in-place, Graffiti Inspection Requests on Private Property are not considered an essential function. As a result, we will defer this inspection until the shelter-in-place has been lifted.”

The aftermath of the Non Plus Ultra sweep, Huerta said, has been incredibly hard on those who lost everything. “When you live on the street and you don’t have anything, and someone comes in and steals all your stuff and then just laughs at you about it, it puts them in a spot that’s worse than they were in before,” he said. He lost property in the sweep as well, including car repair parts he was storing there with friends.

He’s filed a police report over the theft of his items.  

The Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights is investigating the incident. Larson said they may each be entitled to $25,000 compensation under California’s Tom Bane Civil Rights Act, which can be deployed when someone’s legal rights are denied through “threats, intimidation or coercion.”  

“It’s so egregious to do this under the cover of night,” Larson said. “The facts could not be more heartbreaking and disturbing. This is vigilante injustice.”

CORRECTION Sept. 15, 2020, 10:28 p.m. Corrects Non Plus Ultra’s role in Disrupt to that of a provider of event space.

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Uber and Lyft had threatened to shut down operations last week in a high stakes game of chicken with the state. If the companies fail to win their argument in court, California voters will decide the issue this November with Proposition 22, which would carve out an exemption for the traffic network companies, as they are called by the state.  

The companies have a near monopoly on rides for hire, with only a weakened taxi industry to take up the slack if Uber and Lyft decide to leave California. 

Evelyn Engle with the San Francisco Taxi Workers Alliance said that would be a tall order. “Certainly taxi drivers would have done all they could to step up and fill in the gaps,” she said. “But it’s definitely at a spur of the moment like that. And in the middle of the COVID pandemic, and shelter-in-place order, it would have been difficult.”

San Francisco has far fewer taxis on the street than before ride-hailing companies began operations, she said. “At its peak, there were around 1,800 to 2,000 taxis in San Francisco that were operating around the clock,” Engle said. “As of the end of 2019 there were approximately 1,300 taxi medallions in operation. It’s a little bit unclear right now in August 2020. There’s fewer in operation right now, but part of that is because drivers have chosen not to work during the pandemic.”

If they fail to win in court or at the ballot, Uber and Lyft are reportedly considering a plan to require drivers to work for an intermediary company — such as a taxi business — that would become their actual employer, allowing ride-hailing companies to continue to operate as nothing more than technological platforms. 

Engle is opposed to that idea. “In other countries where Uber is working with taxis, they’re doing so because the state or the local government forced them to do that to comply with regulations,” she said. “Here in California, if Uber and Lyft follow that model they’re doing so to avoid following the law. They’re going to try to set up this alternative system that will distance themselves from the drivers. So while it may appear similar, it’s really for a very different reason that they would go to the franchise model here.”

Uber feels confident that it will win Proposition 22 In November. The company has rolled out a program called “Working Together,” which would allow drivers to remain independent contractors while Uber makes an unspecified match contribution to what it calls “the benefits that mattered most to our drivers.” It is also proposing occupational accident insurance to cover on- the-job injuries. 

The plan does not include sick leave, unemployment or vacation benefits. Uber cites a poll by Bennison Strategy Group and GS Strategy Group that found that 85% of drivers favor the “Working Together” plan or the status quo, with only 15% opting for traditional employment status. 

A segment from our radio show and podcast, “Civic.” Listen at 8 a.m. and 6 p.m. Tuesdays and Thursdays at 102.5 FM in San Francisco, or online at ksfp.fm, and subscribe on Apple, Google, Spotify or Stitcher. 

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Most of the time, the video cameras we walk past every day are innocuous fixtures in the background. But because they’re so prevalent, when law enforcement officials gain access, webs of security cameras can be used as surveillance networks to monitor the everyday behavior of a massive number of city residents – and in many cases, the public would know little to nothing about it.

Studying the surveillance technology in use by law enforcement in the Bay Area has led us to believe camera registries and networks are so prevalent that residents could rightly question whether their purpose is for surveillance instead of security. But uncovering how and when these cameras and other technologies are being used is not easy.

While law enforcement agencies are technically complying with a recently enacted transparency law, three of the region’s largest police forces disclose their capabilities in formats that make it difficult for a layperson to learn which technologies are in use, and how, without already knowing where to look.

Listen to the authors of this piece at a recent Public Press Live webinar:

Camera surveillance ubiquitous

Camera networks and registries are pervasive in the Bay Area, which means people going about their everyday lives in communities that employ these tools may not realize how likely it is that their activities are recorded and retained by a system designed to fight crime and enforce laws.

Camera networks vary in terms of ownership. Camera registries, for which residents register personal video surveillance systems with local law enforcement, rely on residents voluntarily working with law enforcement agencies and are rarely properly documented under Senate Bill 978, a recently enacted transparency law. Other networks are managed directly by law enforcement.

We counted 36 camera networks in the Bay Area, of which 29 are directly run by law enforcement agencies. Some are provided and run by private entities. One such example was detailed in a recent New York Times article on a wealthy San Francisco resident who bankrolled an expanding network of privately-owned security cameras. The Electronic Frontier Foundation revealed in July that the San Francisco Police Department was granted remote access to this private network to surveil protestors — counter to local privacy law, which would have required city permission, the foundation alleged.

The camera network operated by the Moraga Police Department in Contra Costa County is an example of smaller, more targeted use of surveillance cameras. According to documents published by the Moraga Community Foundation in April 2017, cameras were installed at strategic locations and accessed by police investigators only in relation to solving a crime.

Most law enforcement agencies fail to specify when they will delete the data they collect through these networks. For example, the Fairfield Police Department states in its policy manual that data should be retained for a minimum of 30 days. The Cloverdale Police Department states recordings must be stored for a minimum of one year. Neither policy manual specifies a limit for how long the agencies can hold recordings that are not being used in legal proceedings.

Camera registries, which law enforcement agencies can only access by calling on a resident who has voluntarily registered their video system, are often framed as an ideal example of community-law enforcement agency partnerships and are touted as strengthening the relationship between citizens and law enforcement.

In our search, we were unable to locate lists of participants to understand who is signing up for such partnerships, or how many people participate. Just three of the 32 agencies that we know use camera registries have disclosed policies detailing the governing functions of these programs, which is required under SB 978. This means that for residents under the jurisdiction of the 29 agencies with no published governing policies, there is no way for individuals to know more about the camera footage that could be used to surveil them. 

Body cameras, license plate readers top list of surveillance technologies

To address this lack of transparency, California Governor Jerry Brown signed Senate Bill 978 into law in October 2018. It requires, by January 1, 2020, that each of California’s local law enforcement agencies conspicuously post their standards, policies, procedures and training materials on their official websites, to provide their communities with a comprehensive understanding of what capabilities and actions they should expect from their police forces.

While this information was not secret before SB 978, access required specific and individual requests through the California Public Records Act. Senator Steven Bradford (D-Gardena) authored SB 978, stating that he hoped, among other benefits, the law would “build mutual trust as well as improve police accountability.”

We used both open source media like newspapers and law enforcement agencies’ own SB 978 documentation to examine and record the surveillance techniques and capabilities employed by law enforcement agencies in the Bay Area. We studied 80 law enforcement bodies, including some that are part of universities or community benefit districts, which are not subject to SB 978’s disclosure requirements. Raw data from all 80 agencies provide an aggregate view of how law enforcement operates throughout Alameda, Sonoma, Solano, Contra Costa and San Francisco counties. We created a spreadsheet and map meant as a tool for anyone doing specialized research on police surveillance in this region.

We found that the most prolific technologies in use are body-worn cameras, automated license plate readers, camera networks and camera registries, as seen in the table below. Of the 80 agencies studied, 85% employ either camera networks, camera registries or both. We also found that three of the region’s largest police forces disclose their capabilities in ways that make finding relevant information tedious and difficult.

Disclosures bring only limited transparency

Some agencies’ disclosure documents comply with the letter, but not the spirit, of SB 978. The majority — 51 of the 67 law enforcement agencies examined — simply published their manuals in Portable Document Format (PDF) on their websites, with the text recognizable to a browser’s search function, making it easy to search specific terms like “Body Camera” or “Automated License Plate Reader.” A digital search for key terms encompassed the entire publication and required no familiarity with naming conventions or file format.

But 16 agencies sectioned their manuals into separate PDF documents and published links to each section. This requires an outsider to correctly guess which section to open for searches, and ultimately results in repetitive searches across all the published sections. In order to view the Oakland Police Department’s policy on body-worn-cameras, for example, a user must successfully navigate a hierarchy of folders and specialized headings.

The San Francisco Police Department, too, partitions its required publication. Meanwhile, San Francisco also has a Committee on Information Technology that is required by city ordinance to publish this page, which lists all of the surveillance technologies employed by all city departments. The committee’s list of technology used by SFPD is extensive but explicit and includes a reference to Pen-Link, a communications company that provides law enforcement agencies with technology that intercepts electronic communications. But we were unable to find any explanation of this technology in the SFPD’s policy publications, although we may have missed it in our manual search through its partitioned interface.

Oakland’s and Berkeley’s police publications are similarly arranged, and thus similarly opaque. The San Francisco Sheriff’s department is considerably worse. The Sheriff’s policies, pictured below, are both partitioned and stored as scanned and non-searchable images without an index or table of contents, thus requiring any researcher to manually scan more than 650 pages of content.

We have criticized law enforcement agencies from San Francisco, Oakland and Berkeley for how they have complied with Senate Bill 978 because these agencies could easily clarify how they’ve presented their policies to their communities.

For greater trust and accountability, police departments that rely on surveillance camera footage should articulate how their officers obtain that footage, how they use it, and who gets access. Furthermore, we recommend that all agencies publish their policies in a way that an uninitiated outsider can navigate. These are simple revisions that might bring greater accountability and trust to about 1.5 million Bay Area citizens.

Shelby Perkins and Craig Nelson are graduate students at Stanford University’s Freeman Spogli Institute, where they study international policy. The views expressed here are their own.  

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The camera network in question is managed by the Union Square Business Improvement District. Emails obtained by the foundation show that the group received, and approved, a request from SFPD to obtain remote access to the cameras for 48 hours on May 31. Two days later, police personnel made a request to extend that access “through the weekend,” when demonstrations were planned that “we worry will turn violent again.”

While the emails don’t offer further details about the kind of access officers were granted or how they used it, on June 10 an officer wrote district staff an email thanking them for “assisting us with our request for the use of your cameras during this period of civil unrest and rioting.”

Critics describe such cooperation as problematic. “There’s a history in this country of surveillance technology being not just surveillance technology, but surveillance in general being used to chill dissent,” said Dave Maass from the foundation in an interview with “Civic” earlier this month about law enforcement agencies surveilling protesters.

Reports by the New York Times and ABC7 have probed the relationship between private camera networks like this one and the police department, suggesting that private networks might be more palatable to privacy advocates who balk at extended law enforcement surveillance capacity. Both outlets spoke with Chris Larsen, CEO of the cryptocurrency firm Ripple and one of the network’s financial backers.

“The police can’t monitor it live, it’s actually against the law in San Francisco,” Larsen told ABC7. “They have to make a request just like anybody else.”

SFPD may not have inherent, on-demand access to live feeds, but their request for access was granted in a timely manner. And Maass and Matthew Guariglia from the Electronic Frontier Foundation argue that this is a violation of a privacy law passed in San Francisco last year requiring law enforcement to engage in a public process to get approval to access surveillance technology managed by third parties.

Hear Dave Maass speak at a recent Public Press Live webinar on surveillance:

“SFPD’s unfettered and indiscriminate live access for over a week to a third-party camera network to monitor protests was exactly the type of harm the ordinance was intended to protect against,” Maass and Guariglia wrote.

Sergeant Michael Andraychak said the police department needed time to research a request for comment on allegations the camera access violated the law and could not respond by the time of publication.

Caches of footage are also being used by the business district and the SFPD to pursue criminal charges. The foundation reported that the police department asked for, and received, 12 hours of footage from all the cameras in the Union Square Business Improvement District’s network during the night of May 30 to the morning of May 31, when looters damaged several businesses in Union Square. On June 2, the San Francisco Business Times reported that the business improvement district was using this footage in collaboration with the police department to pursue some 36 criminal cases against suspected vandals.

In his interview with “Civic,” Maass discussed the prevalence of digital surveillance. “This is something that happens in our society, even if it’s not legal, even if it feels like it’s unconstitutional,” he said. “It’s important to keep an eye on it to make so when it does happen, you can stop it or hold the perpetrators accountable.”

“Civic” spoke with Cyrus Farivar, a reporter on the tech investigations unit of NBC News in San Francisco and author of “Habeas Data,” about law enforcement surveillance of protests. He said one concern about expanded surveillance capacity is that people engaged in perfectly lawful activity are caught in broad data gathering like automated license plate readers and cameras. A person engaged in perfectly legal activity — like protesting — may still be uncomfortable with the government having a record of the activity they engage in.

“This type of technology, surveillance technology, is getting more sophisticated by the day,” Farivar said. “As time goes on, I think it’s incumbent on all of us to ask questions, whether we are trained journalists or not, to find out what kinds of surveillance are being used in our cities and our counties and our states and our nation.”

— Additional reporting from Ciara Long

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Oakland-based Renegade.bio, created just four weeks ago, has raced to obtain federal authorization and develop tests, while also formulating a plan to make it easier for people to access the tests. San Francisco-based Carbon Health, founded in 2015, started gearing up to offer COVID-19 testing in February, and created a free online symptom tracker to help more easily and quickly identify those infected with the virus.

“Per capita, California has tested amongst the fewest number of people, and I’m not sure why that is,” Carbon Health co-founder and medical director Dr. Caesar Djavaherian said in an interview. “We don’t have fewer labs per people. We don’t have fewer scientists per capita, and we do have a very strong network of providers, like Kaiser.”

Just over 90,100 of the 35.9 million Californians had been tested for COVID-19 as of the end of March, or about 0.25 percent of residents, according to the California Department of Public Health. The department did not respond directly to questions seeking details about what its plans may be for ramping up testing, saying only, “We are working with both private partners and our public health labs to review and obtain rapid tests. May have more information on this for you in the near future.” Instead a public affairs representative sent a link to a press conference held by Gov. Gavin Newsom on April 2 via Twitter.

Laboratories in Germany, with a population of nearly 83 million, are conducting more than 50,000 coronavirus tests per day, according to an April 2 Financial Times report. Germany has performed at least 918,460 tests since the start of the crisis, covering around 1.1 percent of the population, the report said.

The public health department’s website shows that 22 public health labs in California are testing samples for COVID-19. The state is also partnering with Verily, a Google affiliate formerly named Google Life Sciences, which has launched a program called Project Baseline to expand screening for high-risk individuals in Santa Clara or San Mateo counties, or within 50 miles of Riverside or Sacramento.

Meanwhile, a team of UC Berkeley scientists and clinicians recently built a ‘pop-up’ laboratory that can process 1,000 COVID-19 swab tests per day, and San Francisco has added a new testing site. “As of this week in San Francisco, a COVID-19 testing site has become available at San Francisco General Hospital, which can perform around 100 tests per day,” said hospital spokesperson Brent Andrew. However, he added, “people should still contact their primary care physician or clinic” to get a test ordered.

Sprinting to build a new test

Like the rest of the world, Oakland-based scientist and self-proclaimed biohacker Craig Rouskey was glued to the news in early March as the pandemic unfolded – but the most salient update for him was the publication of a Centers for Disease Control primer and probe information for SARS-Cov-2, the name of the novel coronavirus. The primer covers a method for diagnostic testing that Rouskey and his circle of colleagues had the technical skills to use almost immediately to test people for the virus. The CDC primer provided the key that a lab would need to begin testing.

That was March 10. By March 15, his team, doing business as Renegade.Bio, had started running the first test samples, needed to prove to the Food and Drug Administration that the testing methodology was sound. Rouskey had just completed a stint with IndieBio, a biotech accelerator program in San Francisco, linking him to a network of people who had the necessary skills and access to a lab with the proper certification level to process human samples. Renegade.Bio was incorporated as a public benefit corporation, which means it’s legally required to consider how decision-making affects workers, customers and community.

As of March 22, Renegade.bio was still racing to obtain federal emergency use authorization, which would authorize the team to begin running diagnostic tests. Its plan is to partner with Bay Area Phlebotomy and Laboratory Services, which provides house calls for blood testing, to dispatch couriers in full hazmat gear to patients’ homes to administer swab tests.

Rouskey – whose experience includes developing vaccines for anthrax and designing HIV vaccines  – is aiming high, saying he envisions testing millions of samples within the next six months. He adds that he is heartened to see other labs doing the same, including those that can deliver test results more rapidly than the two hours his lab takes. “We need to test everyone,” he said, calling it the single most important priority for getting a handle on the virus.

Carbon Health started working to address the novel coronavirus in mid-February. That’s when “we had a patient come into our clinic who had recently come back from Wuhan City and was experiencing fever,” said co-founder Djavaherian, noting that patient couldn’t get tested despite displaying symptoms. “We were very frustrated,” he added.

Getting answers early

After that experience, “we put all of our company’s energy onto trying to identify patients early,” he said. Carbon Health did that by creating an online symptom tracker and making virtual follow-up visits available to patients for $49 out-of-pocket, or free with insurance. The company, which offers online booking and other technology services to connect doctors and patients, had conducted nearly 1,000 tests across California as of April 1.

Having answers about whether they’re infected is critical not only for patients who might be in for a battle against a life-threatening illness, but for asymptomatic carriers who can easily and unwittingly pass the virus along to relatives, friends or strangers.

Due to the low number of tests conducted so far, “we’re not even quite sure how many patients are asymptomatic carriers of coronavirus,” said Djavaherian. “Having everyone stay at home quarantined is a function of not knowing who’s infected and who’s not.”

In response to a question submitted via the Twitter press conference about whether the state could do a better job at partnering with business to supply more personal protective equipment and expand testing, Newsom said he was inspired by businesses that had stepped up. He noted that “350 manufacturers have already committed to meeting this moment.”

The push by startups into this market could be an indication that COVID-19 tests will start to become more widely available in the months ahead. Still, there’s little information available as to what targets state health officials may have for expanding test availability, or for deepening partnerships with public and private labs.

As long as early and widespread COVID-19 testing remains elusive in California, it’s unlikely that shelter-in-place orders can be safely lifted anytime soon.

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