Police Invest Big In Surveillance
In Which: You are encouraged to map your neighborhood. HPD provides military equipment update. And New Urbanism reforms could benefit Public Safety.
Districting Update
This week saw some districting updates that I’ll cover in more detail next week. The main points to know are:
The City of Hayward ran an online districting workshop if its own on June 11th. They’ll also have several pop-up events at street parties and family events throughout June. Check the Schedule for details.
Hayward Unified School District held a public hearing last night, June 12th. I haven’t had a chance to watch it yet—life, she gets in the way—but we’ll be writing something up for next week. So stay tuned for that.
The Hayward Area Recreation and Park District is still working on its process. They’ve committed to 5 public hearings before landing on districts, but so far no schedule has been released or voted on. Their June 3rd meeting didn’t mention Districting at all, so hopefully the next one will have more information.
Engagement has still been pretty sparse, from what I can tell, so if you haven’t done so yet, map your neighborhood and submit it to the School District and the City so that your community isn’t broken up.
If you’re not sure why this is important, check out this cool video.
Council Public Safety Committee
Diligent readers will remember that, in response to the Community Services Commission’s (CSC) justified concern about the Community Advisory Panel (CAP) to the Chief of Police being used to endorse policy while at 1/4 of it’s membership, Councilmember Ray Bonilla Jr. put forward the idea of creating a Public Safety Committee. It’s goal is to provide oversight for the Fire and Police Departments, though notably without any substantial public input beyond any other public meeting.
This has been good news for the Fire Department—the perennial Jan Brady to the Police Department’s Marcia Brady—which has historically only been able to report to council during the annual budget meetings. The Committee started meeting in April, and seem to be meeting about every-other month.
Accessibility
Council meetings are not, historically, easy to get to. City Hall isn’t near most of Hayward—with our Downtown being in the far north-east corner of the City limits—and a 5:30 start time is technically after work, but hardly accessible for most people. But there are limits on staff time and availability, so that’s fine. It’s hosted on Zoom and accessible that way, which is good.
It’s also, like almost every other committee of importance, recorded—at least in theory. Right now the only video that has a link is for the April 9th meeting, and that one goes directly to a page that says “Permission Denied.” Whether that’s a clerical error or a purposeful way to place more barriers between the public and police accountability is impossible to say. I’ve emailed City Staff to alert them about the issue and it will hopefully be resolved soon.
Fire Department Drones
The Fire Department has purchased 8 drones at the cost of $100,000 for use in a variety of emergency situations: Weather Emergencies, Hazmat and Hazardous Events, Wildland Fire, Over the bridge/Boat Rescue, Mutual Aid, Lost Hiker and others. While drones usually ring alarm bells for their potential abuse as mobile warrantless surveillance birds, at least the Fire Department doesn’t carry guns on them at all times.
One of the proposals to counter the Police’s use of drones was to have them live in the Fire Department and allow the Police Department to borrow them, but unsurprisingly that plan didn’t fly with City Council—of note, that drone plan was rubber-stamped by the CAP. At the very least, the Fire Department drones can’t break windows to enter buildings and only have loud speakers on them.
Flock Cameras
Speaking of surveillance, the City of Hayward can be prepared to see at least 135 Flock license plate reader cameras. We already have 29 installed from a pilot project, then Eric Swalwell’s office—ever the champion of the people who definitely doesn’t put his thumb on the scales of local politics by bankrolling centrist candidates—made sure we got 70 more, with Council authorizing a further 35. HPD highlighted—twice in as many months—how the Flock cameras helped stop a Walgreens theft, which is the standard way these things are presented.
For every technological investment, HPD follows the same playbook:
Use salary savings, grant money, or any other money they can find to buy something that, at best, gets passed as a Consent item by Council
Choose a singular incident to highlight why we should invest more money into it
Continue using the same story repeatedly to keep getting more money.
It’s the same reason all of our officers on patrol carry military grade AR-15’s with them—more on that later—they may need them to kill a bank robber in military-grade body armor like happened one time in Los Angeles 30 years ago. In this case, the constant surveillance of our City intensifies in the name of “safety.” In a time when inflation is driving families to stand in line for an hour for free diapers at the Library, I can think of many things that $375,000 could go to instead of license plate cameras that would actually help people’s material position and curb crime.
Meanwhile, the salary savings keep coming as there are currently 37 Sworn Officer vacancies and 21 Police Staff vacancies—each Sworn Officer position nets them over $100,000 in salary, not to mention the benefits savings—meaning they have $3,700,000 sitting around. They use it to do things like purchase Peregrine Software Solutions, buy more drones that break windows to enter buildings, or to look magnanimous and donate their savings to other departments that don’t take up 1/3 of the full-time staff of the City.
And speaking of money…
The Down Low on HPD Military Equipment
If you’re interested in Police Militarization, you’re gonna want to familiarize yourself with AB 481. This is a law that forces all police departments in California—from Alameda County Sheriffs to BART Police to HPD—to disclose their current stock of military equipment, as defined by AB 481, and develop some kind of use policy.
For Hayward, that policy was voted on a while back and is already in place—not that it couldn’t use some adjustment—but every year, HPD is required to give an update on its military equipment inventory, how often it was used, and what it plans on buying for the next year. Rather than type out the full list, I’ll let this slide do the talking:
Firstly, we should address the quotation marks around military equipment. HPD has taken a passive-aggressive tone around the use of the term military equipment in regards to AB 481, often calling it “so-called military equipment” or putting the term in quotes. They don’t see things like Carbine Rifles (of which they have 108) or Remington 700 (337) as military equipment—nevermind that M4 Carbines, which fire the same 5.56 FMJ cartridges (68,000 in possession), and Remington 700’s (5 in possession) are standard equipment used by the US Army.
There’s probably some minor technical difference that encourages the continued use of quotation marks and “so-called’s”, but the point is that these have been defined as military equipment by state law, whether anyone likes it or not.
Another fun fact is how often—or not—different things are used. UAS, or drones to the rest of us, were used 64 times in the last year—a sharp drop from the first reporting period which saw the used almost twice a week over a 6 month period. The Armored Personnel Carrier (APC)—to transport SWAT—was used 19 times, and the Carbines were used 2 times. But “used” isn’t defined—at least not in the presentation—so it’s unclear whether the carbines were simply “deployed” or actually fired. I’d assume fired, since it’s likely that officers in the APC would be equipped with carbines.
And lastly come the purchasing requests—or notification, as it’s not framed like a request in the presentation. The big ticket items are another on-the-ground robot, 6 more drones (to a total of 17)—no information on brand or capabilities—and 5 more sniper rifles (total of 10). This totals out at about $100,000. On top of that, $50,000 on specialty ammunition and about $17,000 on “less-lethal” things like flash-bangs and “specialty impact munitions systems.”
This whole report should come before the full City Council before the end of the Fiscal Year, though with the new Council Public Safety Committee things may have changed. Either way, this is how we watch the watchmen and keep ourselves safe.
Conditions For Vehicle Break-ins and Thefts
The HPD also delivered a report on vehicle break-ins and thefts in the Jackson Triangle—the “G Beat” in Police lingo.
This is a heat-map of where reports of vehicle break-ins and thefts have occurred. It’s important to say “reported” because there is a difference between a reported theft and a confirmed theft. Not saying this isn’t a real issue, but definitions are important and sometimes agencies play with statistics to suit themselves.
HPD is focusing its data efforts on this area because it’s a Hayward Promise Neighborhood—somewhat misleadingly labeled as “South Hayward”. A survey conducted by the Promise Neighborhood allegedly showed crime as the top problem in their neighborhood—I only say allegedly because I haven’t seen the wording from the actual survey.
The presentation then showed the heat map next to a map highlighting multi-family properties and the conditions in some of the areas. Police observations included: “density of parked cars, lack of building frontage, tights are only on one side of the street, tree coverage reduces line of site [sic].” They’re taking note of the physical conditions that help facilitate these crimes: lighting, coverage, etc.
In looking at the photos, you see what appears to be a relatively normal street in Hayward:
Cars are parked along the streets bumper to bumper, no sidewalk in some places, houses set way back, no pedestrians in sight, long straight roads with relatively low traffic volume.
Now, HPD put forward an interesting proposal: explore lighting options and pedestrian improvements. This is at the heart of how New Urbanism intersects with Public Safety. Those gates don’t make us safe, they keep us from being on the street to watch our neighbors. 20 foot setbacks decrease visibility and make the walk less friendly, meaning there are fewer people on the streets so people feel more bold. Every person in a household needs a car to get around, so they spill onto the street where they are more vulnerable.
Even the HPD acknowledges that they don’t deal in prevention. They’re a response department—they show up after something bad has already happened. They don’t stop crime from happening. Things like walkable streets, fewer cars, street lights, corner shops, and tight neighborhoods make things safe. We keep us safe. If we start addressing the physical environment that facilitates crime, we can also address prevention in the form of mental healthcare, housing as a human right, food security, and third spaces.
Imagining what we could do with over $3,200,000 worth of investment into healthcare while revamping zoning to make walkable mixed-use neighborhoods a reality—that’s transformative safety. Flock cameras won’t make it happen. Drones won’t make it happen. Peregrine Software Solutions won’t make it happen. If we want safer neighborhoods, we need to invest in them instead of policing them.