San Diego Mayor, Police Chief Claim City’s Surveillance Oversight Law Is Just ‘Obstruction’

(Mis)Uses of Technology

from the stop-touching-our-stuff dept

Law enforcement agencies aren’t used to oversight or accountability. That’s something that has rarely been deemed essential to the act of policing. After all, if the Supreme Court can create “qualified immunity” out of thin air to protect (most) cops from the consequences of their unconstitutional actions, surely podunk locals shouldn’t assume they’re more qualified than the Supreme Court (or the cops themselves) to judge their actions.

But things haven’t been going cops’ way lately. This is entirely due to cops’ own actions, which have repeatedly dis-endeared them to the public. And even if the voting bloc is generally considered to be too stupid to competently criticize cops, cops are finding fewer supporters from those in voting booths as well as those being voted for.

But when cops have managed to set the nation on fire (figuratively and literally) on a nearly annual basis for the past thirty years, some legislators have decided it might be time to do something.

And “something” it almost always is. Sure, some legislators push dumbass “blue lives matter” laws but other legislators appear to believe the public might be better served by holding local law enforcement agencies to some sort of standard, rather than just allowing them to do what they want.

In San Diego, this belated recognition that allowing cops to go rogue on the regular might be a bad idea has manifested as a surveillance oversight ordinance that gives legislators and residents more say in what surveillance tech cops can obtain and how they can use. It passed last September with the city council’s approval, prompted in part by the city’s mishandling of a “smart” streetlight program that provoked plenty of negative comments from city residents.

They weren’t just streetlights. They were streetlights with surveillance cameras that also acted as automated license plate readers. Combining the necessary (lights for streets) with something that only benefited law enforcement (the rest of it) wasn’t what residents wanted. Hence the new ordinance, which places more guidelines on surveillance tech and deployment.

Now that these guidelines are in force, the city’s mayor (Todd Gloria) and the San Diego police chief are now claiming this minimal move towards more oversight and accountability is simply making it impossible for the PD to do its job. And the police chief has used loaded language that equates accountability with a criminal act.

At the briefing, San Diego police Chief David Nisleit said 17 police technologies used to investigate everything from traffic collisions to crimes against children can no longer be used or soon won’t be available for use since they have contracts that have either expired or will expire before the tools have the chance to go through the oversight process.

The department did not provide specific expiration dates for those technologies, which include powerful tools like Graykey, a device that can break into some locked cellphones.

“This ordinance is not oversight, it’s obstruction,” Nisleit said. “The flaws in this ordinance will hamper our ability to investigate serious crimes, protect victims and keep our community safe.”

Yep, that’s what he said: oversight is pretty much just obstruction of justice as far as he’s concerned. Forcing the PD to be a bit more selective when acquiring and deploying surveillance tech is apparently indiscernible from preventing a cop from arresting a suspect.

Mayor Gloria has already made it clear he’s going to have the law amended to remove a few layers of accountability. And he’s doing this despite the fact the PD and the city have yet to actually comply with the law. Once of its most minimal requirements — the production of a list of all technologies affected by the law — has yet to be completed despite the law being enacted nearly a year ago.

And these things are being said by city leaders (mostly just the mayor) even though no statements have been made about what exactly makes the law unworkable, other than the PD’s insistence that it is.

Although the city has spoken numerous times about how imperative changes to the law are, officials have yet to be specific about what sections of the ordinance they would seek to amend or how.

Seth Hall, the co-founder of community group San Diego Privacy, points out in his op-ed for San Diego Tribune that if there’s any “obstruction” happening here, it’s being committed by the mayor and the San Diego PD:

Nisleit has correctly diagnosed obstruction, but it is his and the mayor’s own obstruction, and Nisleit of all people would know.

Mayor Gloria is in the driver’s seat of this process. We have been waiting for nearly two years for the mayor to create and submit an inventory of the city’s existing surveillance technology, as required by the new law. Earlier this month, a messy inventory spreadsheet riddled with duplicates and inaccuracies was finally published in the agenda for the Privacy Advisory Board’s Oct. 5 meeting. That same day, Gloria and Nisleit held a press conference to decry the “obstruction” of an oversight process they themselves have been deliberately standing in the way of.

There has not been even one day since this ordinance was passed that it hasn’t been obstructed at the very first step by Gloria withholding the city’s inventory of existing surveillance technology. The privacy board, the community and the City Council have stood ready. Chief Nisleit need look no further than his own boss when placing blame for obstruction.

Don’t blame everyone else because you refuse to comply with a law you don’t like. And you, Mayor Gloria, don’t go to bat for law-breaking city entities just because you believe they’re more worthy of your attention and undeserved forgiveness than the people you’re actually supposed to be serving.

The problem here is the lack of compliance, not the law itself. The city has yet to comply with the law. The same can be said for the PD. If you can’t be bothered to comply with the law, it’s not a great look to go around complaining about it. All that’s happening right now is a bunch of pointless whining deliberately designed to restore the minimal accountability the SDPD has become accustomed to. And, unfortunately for San Diego residents, the person who’s supposed to put their interests first, has decided to align himself with a city agency that has the will and power to simply ignore laws it doesn’t like.

Filed Under: david nisleit, oversight, police oversight, san diego, san diego pd, todd gloria