Lethal robots in the hands of San Francisco police?

What could possibly go wrong?

Tomorrow, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors will vote on a proposal to arm local police robotic drones with lethal weapons. It is an authoritarian policy whose very suggestion reveals a disturbing political trend in our city that should shame every San Franciscan.

Does San Francisco still deserve its supposedly “progressive” reputation?

Two Steps Forward, Three Steps Back

Proposing to arm SFPD drones with lethal force is positively ignorant, especially when contrasted with the progress emerging across the rest of California. At the state level, California recently expanded a policy to become among the first states in the nation to proactively seal criminal records after most defendants complete their sentences. Just last year, our state adopted several measures to curtail the use of force by human police officers.

Giving police robots lethal weapons would senselessly move in the opposite direction.

Photo credit: Raymond Wambsgans

We’ve all seen how often police get it wrong. Every innocent person killed by police proves the point, as does every example of state violence towards unarmed dissidents or journalists. Every time an innocent person is executed by the state proves the point further, as does every prisoner exonerated after conviction for crimes they did not commit, often after losing years of their lives to biased so-called “justice.”

Especially in this context, arming robots—with even less discretion than human police officers—would be senseless, lazy, and predictably lead to innocent people ending up in early graves. Too many innocent San Franciscans have already been killed by SFPD officers.

Convenient Claims Ignore Alternatives

Police don’t just kill some innocent people and send others to prison. Recent examples from Uvalde, Texas to Colorado Springs, Colorado also reveal how little police actually do to protect public safety. Those particular events revealed police not only failing to take meaningful action in the face of a threat to public safety, but then counterproductively impeding and even detaining civilians who did the right thing.

On the one hand, police officers failing to intervene when innocent lives are threatened might seem like a reason to arm robots and deploy them instead. Policies to reduce risks to police officers in the face of potential violence are worth considering in the abstract, but applying that reasoning in any given instance requires ignoring that police are paid generous salaries—starting at over $100,000 in San Francisco—precisely because their jobs involve risk.

In fact, policing is far less risky than many other less-compensated lines of work, including construction, logging, delivery driving, mining, and agriculture. Government statistics also prove that policing has grown safer in recent years. If anyone is going to consider arming robots to reduce risks to human police officers, they might consider starting instead with robots to reduce the more substantial risk to laborers—many of whom are from precisely the communities most exposed to arbitrary profiling by police.

Arming drones makes even less sense when considering the costs, particularly to justice, the presumption of innocence, and communities of color long subjected to arbitrary police violence and profiling. It would be one thing if police didn’t already kill over 1,000 people every year and falsely arrest many more, reflecting massive racial disparities and biases. That stark reality, however, suggests that tomorrow’s proposal offers policymakers a chance to leap from a frying pan into a proverbial fire.

Tech can enhance efficiency, but not public safety

Facial recognition technology was presented to the public (by a domestic-facing military industrial complex) as a way to protect public safety. But the profound invasiveness of allowing the government to track everyone’s movements in public space threatens the public more than it could protect us.

That’s why the SF Board of Supervisors adopted the first policy in the country to prohibit the use of facial recognition technology by municipal agencies, including police, in 2019. The Supervisors adopted that policy for many good reasons, some of which I explained to the Board before their historic vote.

Proponents of tech-in-policing presume that public safety challenges are driven by inefficiency in enforcement, as distinct from more intrinsic problems like poverty, social crisis, and desperation. Proponents of tech-in-policing also ignore how technology effectively launders documented racial biases while pioneering new ways to violate fundamental rights, including Due Process. The unique threats posed by facial recognition were among the reasons the Board voted to restrain it in 2019.

Political decisions are dynamic, not static

I’ve frequently called out journalists for being oblivious rubes repeatedly duped by corporate and state leaders. The saga of the Board of Supervisors walking back its historic 2019 policy reflects this pattern.

Most journalists report on policy proposals and decisions as if they represented static positions, as opposed to dynamic vectors. That means that reporting on any given issue inevitably fuels future trends, especially when that reporting indulges or privileges the perspectives of agencies or corporations.

That’s exactly what happened here. Why would elected leaders in a supposedly “progressive” city even consider a proposal so authoritarian as to subject residents to arbitrary execution without charge or trial?

Every story about the supposed “crime wave” sweeping San Francisco has reflected editorial decisions to privilege the perspectives of police and property owners before, for instance, San Franciscans subjected to arbitrary policing. This is not an abstract concern for the few Black residents who remain in our city after the vicious gentrification (in which police played a key role beyond that of the housing market) of the past generation shrank our city’s Black population to roughly a third of its previous peak.

The Board of Supervisors already voted earlier this year to water down their historic decision in 2019 that curtailed police surveillance and expanded civilian oversight, opening the door for more reforms favoring the SFPD over justice and our communities. As I explained at the time:

Mayor Breed, a staunch ally of the San Francisco Police Department, previously proposed a ballot measure to overturn our 2019 ordinance entirely, before then withdrawing it and then proposing a new compromise that merely waters down the Board of Supervisors’ historic previous decision. In particular, the new policy passed by the Board of Supervisors gives police real-time access to surveillance footage owned by private individuals and businesses, subject to their consent and certain (relatively meager) limits.

While the compromise is less damaging than the ballot measure would have been, it continues to undermine civilian oversight of police activities. This support for surveillance without civilian oversight—even at the local level in a supposedly “progressive” enclave despite recent political resistance—reinforces the corruption of a security industrial complex, and reveals the strength of its political tentacles.

Other events this year have pushed this trend towards more aggressive and less humane policing. The recall of former District Attorney Chesa Boudin earlier this year, the Mayor’s ensuing appointment of former SFPD propagandist Matt Dorsey to the District 6 seat on the Board, and Joel Engardio’s victory recent over Gordon Mar in District 4 all politically emboldened the SFPD. 

Proposals to expand their authority even further predictably aim to test the limits of their influence. 

What next?

Take action

If you live in San Francisco, today is a great time to call your Supervisor to convey your concerns and any outrage you might be feeling. Feel free to explain that the SFPD proposal to allow drones to use lethal force:

1. is unapologetically authoritarian, and profoundly out of step with our city’s commitments to civil liberties.

2. indulges concerns about police safety while denigrating pressing concerns about community safety.

3. resigns the Board’s previous leadership on issues of public safety and civil liberties.

4. invites an escalation of tech-washing that has long papered over (or entirely obscured) documented racial biases in law enforcement.

5. compounds an already problematic history of our city marginalizing communities of color.

6. repeats the errors of a federal policy that has already exacerbated international conflict while enabling hundreds (if not thousands) of preventable civilian deaths.

Learn more

Ten years ago, the Loyola Public Interest Law Reporter published my remarks from a symposium hosted by Loyola University Chicago School of Law. The focus of my comments were lethal drone strikes, which then Attorney General Eric Holder had just defended at another law school across town in the preceding days.

Everything I explained in that speech relating to the Pentagon and CIA—legal realism, the continuing erosion of constitutional rights, the unreliability of supposedly limiting principles, the executive branch gaming the courts, the abuse of the state secrets doctrine, and the self-marginalization of the judiciary—also applies here at the local level.

Paid subscribers can access a complete transcript of that speech with footnotes, as well as a video of my TEDx talk at the Harker School in 2017 exploring “American Authoritarianism and Restoring Constitutional Order.” In it, I explain some of the forgotten history underlying contemporary debates over policing, public safety, and constitutional rights.