with the surveillance state.

How Citizen Surveillance Ate San Francisco

When a homeless man attacked a former city official, footage of the onslaught became a rallying cry. Then came another video, and another—and the story turned inside out.

Just when the people of San Francisco thought they’d seen every video—the sidewalk drug runners, the Louis Vuitton mob heisters, the men selling stolen laptops, the smash-and-grabbers snatching a camera from a Prius in traffic, the porch pirates porch pirates porch pirates into infinity, all indexed in the “Lawless San Francisco” section of the great internet video store—yes, just then: Stig Strombeck took out his cell phone camera on April 5 and hit Record.

It was around 7 pm, and Strombeck was on his way to his second job. He’d parked on Lombard Street. Not the famously crooked section up over the hill, but the wide gauntlet that jets toward the Golden Gate Bridge through the Marina district: the preppy hood of woo girls and boat guys and early-career Gavin Newsom and largely law-and-order Democrats. (“Everyone likes to shit on San Francisco, and San Franciscans like to shit on the Marina,” one resident told me. “It’s a victimless crime.”) But lately, even in the Marina, there was no escaping the rest of the city’s problems. The previous November, in a manicured playground just two blocks from where Strombeck was walking, a father said his 10-month-old baby had ingested fentanyl and had to be revived by Narcan—a San Francisco nadir that, to the presumable relief of civic boosters, hasn’t surfaced on film.

On the Lombard sidewalk, Strombeck pulled headphones from his ears and trained his camera on a disturbing scene playing out in the lot of a Shell gas station. Here’s the video: A bear of a middle-aged guy, 5’11”, 230 pounds, faces a rakish, apparently homeless man in his twenties who is wielding a 3-foot-long pole. The older bear of a guy holds his arms up like a boxer as the younger one jockeys with the pole, falls backward off a curb, then lithely spins back to his feet. The older guy blots his eyes and yells, “You’re going to jail, motherfucker.” The younger one, who wears a bright red stocking cap, whacks the bear of a guy across his face, sending him careening to the side. A male voice off camera says “Dude!”—the unmistakable Greek chorus of Wtf, this is insane. The younger guy looks toward the camera. The video stops.

⚠️ WARNING: GRAPHIC CONTENT
The following videos contain graphic content, which some readers may find disturbing.

(see it, embedded on the page, linked in the title above; there are also several .gifs at various points throughout this. I can’t grab ’em, plus it’s easier to just read on the page)

Strombeck stowed his phone, but the action kept spilling into other frames. A daycare’s security cam showed the red-capped figure maniacally chasing the now bloodied man down the Lombard sidewalk before bashing him again. A neighbor pointed his camera down from his third-floor window as the younger guy strode below with the pole in one hand and what looks like the older man’s baseball cap in the other, pumping his arm, looking amped. Another video of the attacker that appears to be shot from a passing vehicle was uploaded to the crime-alert app Citizen, which pinged a software engineer sitting on his couch a few blocks away, who ventured over and filmed the crimson drips and Rorschach splotches of blood leading down the sidewalk. (Strombeck would later testify that by the end of the attack, the big guy was covered in “the most blood I’ve ever seen.”)

The following day, a Marina local named Joan wrote on Nextdoor that she was the mother of Don Carmignani, the man who’d been bludgeoned by the pole: “I want to thank all the neighbors that videoed what was happening & got involved to stop it. If they were not there my son would be dead!” Don was in the hospital, she wrote, with a skull fracture and a broken jaw. City politicians tweeted prayers and a call for more cops. Local news identified Carmignani as a former city fire commissioner, a lifelong San Franciscan and father of two. The assailant: 24-year-old Garret Doty, a recent arrival from Louisiana.

Reports said the attack kicked off when Carmignani asked some homeless people to move away from his elderly parents’ door, which they were blocking. In one TV newscast, a reporter mentions an allegation, from one of Doty’s companions, that Carmignani used “bear spray” during the altercation. The segment then cuts to a close-up interview of Doty’s homeless friend—a striking, red-bearded man named Nate Roye, speaking from under a filthy shearling hood—saying that Doty attacked because Carmignani had been “disrespectful.”

“Is that enough to beat him up?” the journalist asks, incredulously.

“Yeah, sometimes,” Roye replies, with a decisive nod.

San Franciscans know the larger drama that this episode advances, and you probably do too: Tech’s glittering citadel, fallen, with the footage to show it. Within some 40 hours of the Marina attack, in another swank part of the city, a widely admired tech executive named Bob Lee, the former CTO of Square and a founder of Cash App, had staggered past surveillance cameras while bleeding from several stab wounds and later died at the hospital. The two maulings—a beaten fire commissioner, a slain tech executive—upcycled to the national news, putting San Francisco under the national surveillance to which it’s become accustomed, with particularly lip-licking schadenfreude on the right. Here again was Newsom’s and Nancy Pelosi’s doom-looping dystopia, where remote-working techies and fleeing billionaires have ceded the city to IRL Grand Theft Auto.

Carmignani, his family, his attorney, and some witnesses provided images that flickered through the reports and social media: Strombeck’s video from the gas station. A laundromat’s street cam view of Doty grabbing the metal bar out of a trash bin and taking a practice swing. The daycare cam. In the neighborhood itself, the vigorous uptake of these images inspired a kind of hope. Marina residents—forever wary of being pegged as pearl-clutching Karens—thought they finally had their irrefutable proof of how clearly things had gotten out of hand. “Somebody got beat up. It was on camera multiple, multiple places,” one told me. “Like, the best evidence!”

But within days, the clarity crumbled. In the case of tech executive Bob Lee, police arrested not a person off the street but a tech entrepreneur whose sister had been hanging out with Lee. And in private, within the police department, the Carmignani attack was veering off narrative too. A police sergeant, sorting through the symphony of surveillance clips that captured the face-off, played the bodycam footage from a cop who had been interviewing Carmignani’s girlfriend after the attack. The officer asks whether she’d been inside when Carmignani went out to “confront” the guy. She says yes. Then from the ambulance, Carmignani interrupts her, barking a command through his broken jaw, seeming to thicken the plot:

“Don’t say nothing to nobody. Don’t say nothing to any cop, no one.”

In San Francisco there’s always another video. New York and London are known for being blanketed with government-run CCTV coverage, but surveillance here is different: It is as privatized as it is pervasive, a culture of Hitchcock’s Rear Window, at scale.

In the city where Nextdoor’s offices sit right in the gritty Tenderloin, sharing Ring cam footage of porch thieves is a bonding exercise between neighbors who’ve never met. All over town, local nonprofits oversee neighborhood-wide networks of cameras funded in part by donations from crypto entrepreneur Chris Larsen. (“That’s the winning formula,” Larsen told The New York Times in 2020. “Pure coverage.”) Platoons of Waymo self-driving cars circulate the streets like Pac-Man ghosts, gathering up videofeeds that cops snag for evidence. You can watch a resident’s live cam to see who’s on the corner of Hyde and Ellis, right now.

True-crime video has become San Francisco’s civic language, the common vocabulary of local TV news broadcasts, the acid punch line to a million social media posts. The feeds intensified during the pandemic, when commuterless streets erupted with synthetic opioid use and property crime. Since then, the city has found itself hobbled through successive breakdowns—a police shortage, a 34 percent office vacancy rate, a federal injunction severely limiting the city from clearing homeless camps. No one seems to be solving San Francisco’s problems, the feeling goes, so by God, people are going to film the dysfunction and post the footage.

A guy who goes by the handle JJ Smith is probably the most vivid personification of this drive. A longtime resident of the Tenderloin whose brother died of a fentanyl overdose in 2022, Smith—not his real name—films unhoused people as he tries to cajole them into considering treatment. Then he posts the footage on X, where he has about 19,000 followers.

In happier cases, he’ll document when people check into a program and come out clean on the other side. But much of Smith’s footage is far grimmer: coroners rolling sheet-draped corpses out of residential hotels; a cold open on a woman’s face as she OD’s on a sidewalk. Smith explains that he’s just given the woman Narcan, pulling you into morbid suspense combined with an awful feeling of Are we really supposed to be seeing this? Other times, Smith dispenses a tough love that edges into trolling, like the time he snatched away a coat draped over a woman’s head so he could scold her for smoking drugs next to a park where his kids play.

People shrug off statistics, Smith says, but “when you’re actually seeing it, it really gets to you.” Supporters credit him with recording a humanitarian crisis. Critics tweet at him, even chide him on camera: He’s exploiting people who have no privacy with footage they haven’t consented to. (Hey, he says, it’s a public sidewalk.)

Some of the discomfort with Smith, who says he knows many of the people he films, stems from the simple fact that, by now, he’s part of a social media bandwagon. Even presidential hopeful Ron DeSantis once stopped by the Tenderloin to shoot a video. Today, Smith is joined by other accounts like FriscoLive415 and Tenderloin Tube—a cadre that lives somewhere on the border between citizen journalists and dystopic paparazzi. Consider the live birth video. Last spring, a Twitter account that typically posts store-looting vids showed something else: an infant, just born and naked, on a Tenderloin sidewalk, its dazed mother trying to pick the baby up. The event is morally excruciating, but so is its existence here, on X, overlaid with the account’s watermark as the video travels the internet to 1.5 million views, churned into headlines like “Caught on Video: Homeless Woman Gives Birth in Broad Daylight on Tenderloin District Sidewalk.”

(snip-a bit more on the page. Of course, there are twists!)