The Political Fiend

Like many big burgs, San Francisco has a network of “crime cameras” installed in various high crime locations around the city. Now I’m not a huge fan of conducting surveillance on the general public, but my beef here is a different one. See, the city has a policy of deleting this footage a mere 7 days after it’s shot, and it will only turn the tapes over to the police; it won’t hand over the tapes directly to defense counsel, even if they ask nicely.

On October 16, 2007, the San Francisco District Attorney’s office dropped charges against two men, after they spent nearly 70 days in the county lockup. Deputy Public Defender Eric Quandt came to know that the alleged crime scene had a surveillance camera hooked up. He found this out just prior to the deletion of the footage, and managed to persuade city officials to preserve the tape. And of course, the tape showed that the men engaged in the crime were not the two men who had been arrested.

Seven days is an insanely short amount of time to keep this stuff. Seven days isn’t enough time to get an investigator to actually go out an look at the crime scene, let alone figure out that there’s a crime camera at the location, and subsequently subpoena that data. And why should the cops be the only ones to get the tapes? This isn’t national security stuff; these are tapes of people tagging, and getting into scrapes, not of the next big international threat.

I’m not going to get into a constitutional discussion about Brady, or Kyles liabilities here, because it’s really not necessary. I don’t need to peek at the constitution when I’ve got a perfectly good nose, and the way I smell it, San Francisco’s policy stinks. This just reeks of fundamental unfairness.

Photo by Jimmy Harris used under a Creative Commons license.