I live in Oakland and this is a difficult topic.
The type of crime common here is nearly impossible to address without technological assistance. People steal cars, drive into neighborhoods, then break into other cars and houses. They're gone sometimes before a 911 call can even be made, and far before the police arrive. The criminals know this and are just incredibly brazen about it. They'll finish the job with people watching and recording because they know there's no way for them to be caught. People get followed home and held up in their driveway. The criminals are often armed, and people have been shot and killed for even the mildest of resistance. One guy was killed a block from where I was standing for knocking on the window of a getaway car of some guys stealing another car in broad daylight.
Leaving aside broader and more fundamental fixes for crime, which are much longer term projects, the only near-term thing that actually reduces this kind of crime is arrest and conviction rates. In SF, drones have helped reduced car break-ins, because they've actually caught some crews. Oakland doesn't have drones that I know of, but Flock cameras have enabled enough tracking for police to sometimes actually find these people quickly, even several miles away, and make an arrest.
Those are just the plain facts of the situation. It's understandable that people want some kind of solution here. Without at least starting from that understanding, it'll be very difficult to convince people that a solution that is having a positive impact already is not worth the other costs and risks.
And to me, this is the core conflict at a really high level: the economic and societal fixes for crime are usually opposed by the same people who abuse these kind of surveillance systems for authoritarian purposes. To me it's no coincidence that their preferred solution to crime just happens to help them keep an eye on the whole population.
There's a hugely material difference between deterring local property crime and handing ICE this information.
ICE is deporting people to death camps (e.g. CECOT), not giving people due process, operating masked and with military support. ICE is a gestapo in all but name.
By all means, find ways to get your community police departments to address crime in your communities. Work with systems outside of police to fix the systemic root causes (crime doesn't "just happen", it's a symptom of other problems). But you don't need the secret police to fix car jackings and break-ins.
My comment shouldn't be read in any way as supporting ICE or giving ICE this information. Doing so is clearly illegal under California law, and what ICE is doing right now is terrible.
But the prevailing sentiment in these comments is the the cameras shouldn't exist at all, not just that the data shouldn't be shared with ICE. My comment is about how useful the cameras are today. If you want them to not exist you need to understand why they do and probably offer up an alternate solution to the very real problems they address.
ICE is running death camps? Let me guess, the showers are totally secret gas chambers and ICE is collecting shoes in heaps for unclear purposes too.
Sorry to hear this type of law-enforcement will have consequences for congressional redistricting that don’t suit you. You can always try a little chamomile tea.
They didn't say ICE was running death camps, please put on your glasses. They said CECOT is essentially a death camp - which is true.
It's a prison that we have no information on in a totalitarian country. We do know they routinely torture their prisoners. I would think Americans, of all people, would take issue with this.
Evidently, the fascists to be in the US are becoming far too brazen.
>They said CECOT is essentially a death camp - which is true.
Because people are held there for life, or that the death rates there are high?
If you would just extend your quote, like, a couple more sentences, you would see why I said it's a death camp.
That's a neat trick though, including a quote of just a tiny part to give the impression I'm talking out of my ass. Doesn't really work however, because I actually have eyeballs and I think most people here do.
We can just... you know... look, like, 2 inches up.
If you're talking about
>It's a prison that we have no information on in a totalitarian country. We do know they routinely torture their prisoners. I would think Americans, of all people, would take issue with this.
I agree that americans should take issue with this, but as bad as totalitarianism and torture is, those do not make a death camp. By the same token, for all the human right abuses committed in Guantanamo Bay, it's not a death camp. Yes, totalitarian torture camps are bad, and so are death camps, but they're separate things and we shouldn't be in the habit of equating bad-but-not-death camps to Auschwitz just to score some rhetorical points.
Splitting hairs between "death camp" and "torture camp" doesn't change the rhetorical meaning of their post, so they didn't score any additional "points" (who is keeping score? Is this a game?); systematically torturing people is just as depraved as systematically murdering them.
"They only brought a meal once a day and it had maggots. They never take off the lights for 24 hours. The mosquitoes are as big as elephants," La Figura said.
"They're not respecting our human rights," one man said during the same call. "We're human beings; we're not dogs. We're like rats in an experiment."
"I'm on the edge of losing my mind. I've gone three days without taking my medicine," he said. "It's impossible to sleep with this white light that's on all day."
He also claimed his Bible was confiscated.
"They took the Bible I had and they said here there is no right to religion. And my Bible is the one thing that keeps my faith, and now I'm losing my faith," he said.
https://www.cbsnews.com/miami/news/alligator-alcatraz-detain...
inhumane conditions =/= "death camps". There probably is a point where conditions are inhumane enough to cause deaths (think starvation), that it can be called a "death camp" but so far as I can tell from the wikipedia article it's nowhere near that. The article doesn't even mention how many people died there. However, it does mention a poorly supported theory on reddit/X that there's satellite images of body mounds that were subsequently hidden, so that might be what people were thinking of?
[flagged]
[flagged]
Anyone, citizen or non-citizen, illegaly here or legally here, can now be kidnapped off the street, stuffed in an unmarked van by masked men not identifying themselves as police, and sent to a foreign prison, without any due process. This is a little bit beyond merely “deporting illegals.”
> ICE is deporting illegals. How is that equivalent to the Gestapo?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuremberg_Laws
"The two laws were the Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honour, which forbade marriages and extramarital intercourse between Jews and Germans and the employment of German females under 45 in Jewish households; and the Reich Citizenship Law, which declared that only those of German or related blood were eligible to be Reich citizens."
The Holocaust was, broadly speaking, legal under German law at the time. The Gestapo were frequently enforcing laws with their actions. Eventually, Jews were deported to concentration camps; they were made "illegal".
"Legal" and "moral" are sometimes related, but not always. The Gestapo didn't start with the killings.
ICE deports US citizens. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/ice-deported-3-childre...
They're like the gestapo because they act in secret and hide their identities. They arrest dissidents because they say things the administration doesn't like. See Mahmoud Khalil. They're like the gestapo because hateful people get to just make people "illegal" at their own discretion. Half a million Haitians fleeing violence were here under temporary protected status, the executive branch is choosing to make them "illegal" and lying that Haiti is safe now. Half a million people were legal. Now they're "illegal". https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jun/27/haiti-temporar...
They do not follow due process which is guaranteed by the constitution to all persons in the US (not just citizens).
https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2025/jul/13/rosie-odonne... Trump wants to make Rosie O'Donnell "illegal". What are your thoughts on this?
[flagged]
[flagged]
True. You bring up another data point of similarity between ICE and Gestapo: they are/were both legal.
My issue isn't with just the legality, but with morality.
Similarly, the Holocaust was legal under German law, because the Führer willed it so.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F%C3%BChrerprinzip
Thus illustrating the potential gap between legal and moral.
The Führerprinzip mentioned here, by the way, is basically the same argument the conservative supreme court is making right now.
They call it Unitary executive theory in the States, but same idea.
You're correct, fascists will always make morally deplorable acts they wish to enforce with an iron fist legal. Thank you for pointing that out.
Right it's just morally repugnant but it's legal so who cares.
"illegal" is not a noun and the use of it as such dehumanizes people for terrible reasons.
Merriam-Webster says otherwise.
This is hardly a philosophical debate. Oakland is a mess. The previous police chief was fired, and the person that fired him, the mayor, was recalled by voters. And the DA in 2023-2024 was recalled by voters.
The governor warned Oakland in the past to reverse its policy on not engaging in police pursuits. Not surprisingly, the new police chief is proposing changing that policy.
https://oaklandside.org/2025/05/23/oakland-police-pursuit-po...