“We support this policy and ask that the Board of Supervisors approve today so SFPD can continue to use video footage as evidence and as a real-time crime mitigation tool.” These words were said by Abraham, but they were written by the San Francisco Police Department, according to documents obtained by Motherboard through a public records request.Some of these concerns, which were noted as comments in a draft of the policy’s text, were about the policy being used to blanket surveil entire neighborhoods, monitor protests and other First Amendment events, and a lack of any description of what the process for obtaining or severing live feeds would look like in practice.In July, the coalition—which did not have an official name—headlined by EFF and the ACLU provided a red-line markup of the policy to the mayor’s office, which was obtained by Motherboard through a public records request, expressing its concerns about the lack of adequate civil liberty protections and accountability measures.It included language to protect against SFPD receiving “blanket access to live surveillance,” paying the camera owners a nominal fee and therefore being an official SFPD financial partner to circumvent regulations, live-monitoring First Amendment events like protests ostensibly for crowd control purposes, live-monitoring inside of homes, and a total lack of any detail on the exact process for obtaining owner permission and feed access, among other concerns.The spokesperson for the Mayor’s Office said the policy has “guardrails” that were included at the suggestion of advocacy groups, including “explicit prohibitions against using temporary (24 hour maximum) live video access to target anyone for exercising their First Amendment rights.” In fact, that prohibition is extremely vague and easily circumvented, and the Mayor’s Office seemingly ignored EFF’s recommendation to strengthen it."