Intern Taylor Fox contributed to this blog post.
At the height of the George Floyd protests in 2020, the San Francisco Police Department (SFPD) spied on thousands of demonstrators in real time by using a business district’s network of over 300 cameras. The SFPD targeted protests against police brutality led by Black people and other people of color, chilling future racial justice protests by making people less likely to come out in the future out of fear of reprisals from police. The SFPD’s surveillance also violated San Francisco’s Surveillance Technology Ordinance—fought for by marginalized groups—which requires city agencies to get the Board of Supervisors’ approval before using surveillance technology. The SFPD failed to get Board approval, so EFF and the ACLU of Northern California sued San Francisco on behalf of three community organizers and the case is now on appeal.
This January, Asian Americans Advancing Justice – Asian Law Caucus (ALC) and Black Movement Law Project (BMLP), along with 18 other civil rights and grassroots organizations, filed an amicus brief in support of our lawsuit. These organizations detailed SFPD’s long history of spying on San Francisco’s communities of color and political dissidents. In the 1890s, for example, SFPD’s “Chinatown Squad”—one of the country’s earliest police forces used explicitly to address a panic over “ethnic crime”—was raiding Chinese homes and businesses and in some cases physically destroying them with axes. This was shortly after the city spent two decades surveilling Chinatown and mapping every room of every building there.
A century later, in the 1970s, SFPD rebranded the “Chinatown Squad” as a “Gang Task Force,” which ultimately lost a class-action lawsuit for
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