You probably know about San Francisco's problems these days. You've probably seen San Francisco's problems these days—because every squalid nook and dysfunctional cranny of the beautiful city by the bay is under video surveillance. Not a blanket of top-down, government-run CCTV coverage like in New York and London, but a cacophony of private cameras: "a culture of Hitchcock's Rear Window, at scale," writes Lauren Smiley, in her all-seeing latest feature for WIRED. When a brutal beating was caught on camera this April in a chichi San Francisco neighborhood, the footage seemed to confirm a grim narrative—that a lawless homeless population rules even the city's nicer streets with impunity. The apparent aggressor was unhoused; the apparent victim a former city official with deep local roots. But as more and more and more surveillance footage came to light, a richer, more complicated, more twisted story did too. —John Gravois | Features Editor |
