San Diegans have mixed feelings about smart streetlights, some of which police just added in Hillcrest ahead of Pride last weekend.
“I think it’s a privacy thing, I’m not too happy with it. You know, technology nowadays AI, any image can be captured and manipulated for a crime or what not,” Giovanni Zamora said.
Andre Lowe said they are needed.
“I live down here downtown, so I’m seeing a lot of things happen down here. Actually, things have happened to me down here, just recently had my finger cut off with a machete. I mean it’s needed down here,” Lowe said.
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San Diego Police Chief Scott Wahl sent a memo to San Diego city councilmembers last week. It cites an exigent need for the police department to install smart streetlights in nine new locations throughout downtown and around the San Diego Convention Center.
The notification came ahead of Comic-Con weekend, where nearly 150,000 people were expected to gather at that convention center.
The memo says: “the anticipated large attendance may serve as a potential target of opportunity for individuals or groups interested in committing violent or criminal acts.”
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However, privacy advocates are worried the police department is circumventing city law… since the municipal code defines exigent circumstances as “emergency situations involving death or serious physical injury to any individual or imminent danger or significant property damage.”
Seth Hall with the San Diego Trust Coalition said Comic-Con does not meet that definition because there’s no immediate threat to the public.
“When any department, including the police, comes along, and says this event that has been scheduled years ahead of time, or this event that we’ve all known about, essentially is an emergency, makes an emergency, even though we don’t have any particular knowledge of any particular threat, and we want to skip the rules, and we want to do everything without oversight, that kind of activity is very concerning it’s very alarming to us. We don’t believe that that is the right direction for the city. The rules exist, you have to follow the rules, and the laws, and certainly, our police department should be a leading example of following the rules and following the laws,” Seth Hall with the San Diego Trust Coalition said.
Hall said SDPD’s decision to bypass rules intended for transparency erodes trust between community members and the police department.
“As the name of our coalition indicates, the TRUST SD Coalition, that is what we are trying to inspire here. We are trying to inspire San Diegans to be able to use the way that the city government is using this technology. These kinds of actions are really not helpful,” Seth Hall said.
NBC 7 reached out to SDPD for comment and are still awaiting a response. Meanwhile, in the next few weeks city council will have a chance to weigh in on the new camera installments. Chief Wahl has said department officials will remove them if the council were to ask them to do so.
