Police commission hears camera program update; commissioners ask for cost, crime-solve and displacement data

The Police Commission received a multi-part update on the Community Safety Camera (CSC) program and asked the department for more rigorous cost and impact information before committing further resources.

Lieutenant Giddens, the CSC project manager, summarized outreach and technical work since a UC Berkeley "Citrus" team review. He said the team held two community meetings and that field visits to camera clusters in the 16th & Mission and 400 block of Haight showed mostly positive responses from local residents and businesses. "Most of the people in the area said that the cameras are a deterrent and they would like for them to stay," he said. The lieutenant recounted two operational successes: footage that helped establish the sequence of events in a Feb. 23 homicide at Turk and Taylor and March footage that helped identify a juvenile who shot out a camera on Ellsworth Street.

Technical issues dominated the discussion. Giddens said he met with Inspector Roland Talosa, the department's forensic video specialist, and with Department of Technology (DT) and Department of Emergency Management (DEM) staff to address compression ratios, storage capacity and download times. Giddens said DT now expects some improvements in 3 to 6 months. DEM maintains logs of every SFPD viewing, and SFPD now coordinates directly with DT to turn cameras off during demonstrations to avoid process delays.

Commissioners repeatedly asked for clearer measures of program value. Commissioner Pan and others asked for total program cost and alternatives, such as hiring officers; Chief Fong said recruiting several officers could cost roughly $1 million for 7 to 8 officers. Richard Robinson, Chief Operations Officer for DT, told the commission that the current year's maintenance budget included $200,000 for about 70 cameras at 20 locations and that DT could provide total expenditures to date.

Several commissioners noted that the UC Berkeley (Citrus) report found property crime declines inside camera ranges with limited or no effect on violent crime and asked staff to provide before-and-after analyses and migration/displacement studies. Commissioners also asked the department to catalogue incidents in which camera footage materially assisted a solve and to track cases where footage exonerated a person. Community members and a task-force representative said petitions and local experience support keeping cameras in some neighborhoods, while commissioners cautioned against relying on anecdote without statistical confirmation.

Commissioners asked the project manager to return with a recommendation that includes costs, expected outcomes, metrics for success, and how cameras would integrate with community policing and other city strategies.