Mayor Gloria Is Inspired by Chula Vista Police’s Investments in AI, Drones. Is San Diego Next?

How can San Diegans get the city we want?

Mayor Todd Gloria believes doubling down on new police technologies, such as AI and drones, is at least part of the answer.

“I believe that technology will continue to play a key role in making sure that we can hit the marks that we need to have the response times we need to with the limitation of the officers that we have,” Gloria said during a Politifest panel Saturday. 

The panel also featured Councilmember Sean Elo-Rivera and Aimee Faucett, president of Agenda Setting and previously the chief of staff for Mayor Kevin Faulconer.

The police department has struggled to hire and retain officers for many years now, putting pressure on the city’s ailing budget and hiking up emergency response times. During Saturday’s presentation, Gloria said San Diego has 1,822 police officers, which is 178 employees short of the city’s goal. 

The mayor specifically mentioned two controversial technologies employed by the Chula Vista Police Department: police drones and a new program that will use AI to write first drafts of police reports based on body camera footage. 

These programs are pitched as “force multipliers,” the idea being that they will save officers time by giving them tools to prioritize calls and cut down on tedious paperwork. But critics say police drones pose concerns about privacy and unlawful spying, and that generative AI is still too prone to errors and bias.

“Even if an AI program doesn’t make explicit errors, it could still spin things in subtle, biased directions, perhaps in ways an officer doesn’t even notice,” writes Jay Stanely, a senior policy analyst for the American Civil Liberties Union, in an assessment of AI-written police reports. 

San Diego has been bullish in its experimentation with surveillance technology in recent years, including massive investments in streetlight cameras and automatic license plate readers, the latter of which Gloria attributes to a reduction in vehicle thefts. 

Municipalities across the region initially rolled out the license plate readers and smart streetlights to collect environmental data, but both have since been embraced by law enforcement. More recently, critics called on the city to kill its license plate reader program due to concerns about immigrant privacy and high costs.

Gloria’s public safety pitch also included a proposal to merge SDPD with the Harbor Police, which has a force of about 140 officers who operate in the areas directly surrounding the San Diego Bay.

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