Critics of the donation say that it allows wealthy citizens to “buy” policies they want the city to adopt.
“There is a rich person bankrolling technology that police are going to buy and use in the city, also without any democratic approval,” said Matthew Guariglia, a senior policy analyst at the digital privacy nonprofit Electronic Frontier Foundation.
Larsen disagrees that the donation overrides community input. He said it has to go through four levels of oversight — the foundation’s board cleared the funding, and along with the sublease, will now have to gain the approval of the Police Commission, Board of Supervisors, and Mayor Daniel Lurie.
Lurie has expressed support for RTIC and its technology, announcing at an April press conference that SFPD plans to expand the unit in the coming months and crediting its work in part for the city’s drop in crime.
“RTIC has already supported hundreds of arrests, with crime down 30% citywide, and with this new facility, the SFPD will have the tools and the technology it needs to take this work to the next level and help our officers keep our streets safe,” he said in a statement.
Many of the tools the money would fund were also backed by San Francisco voters through the passage of Proposition E, which expanded SFPD’s ability to use surveillance technology and diminished the Police Commission’s power. It received 54% approval last March.
Since then, the RTIC unit has assisted in more than 500 arrests and prevented “numerous” police pursuits, according to the resolution.
“Some of these tools … have been really effective at catching these professional smash-and-grab crews that run roughshod over the city,” Larsen told KQED. “You’ve seen that now in the numbers: over 20% drop from last year in smash-and-grabs, last year was the lowest murder rate since the 1960s.”
Guariglia pointed out that the decline in smash-and-grab robberies isn’t unique to San Francisco. Nationally, property crime was down 8.4% in 2024, according to the Public Policy Institute of California, and it has continued to fall this year.
He said increased surveillance can easily have a disproportionate and negative impact on poorer, more vulnerable communities, depending on where the technology is placed.
“If you live in a neighborhood with more surveillance … they are open to police harassment for jaywalking, for littering, a lot of really small minor things that are actionable for officers, but if you live in fancier neighborhoods up the hill with less cameras, you can get away with,” he said.
Larsen said he understands that concern, but believes that San Francisco’s public safety policy has swung too far on both sides of the pendulum in recent years, from over- to under-policing. The current surveillance technology, he said, can be used in a conscious way.
“The concern for the pendulum swinging too far the other way again is a valid one,” he said. “There’s a lot of room here to make sure that the police have the tools they need for their basic job, but everybody has to be concerned about it going too far, and we are, too.”
