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By Lauren Smiley
Just when the citizens of San Francisco thought they’d noticed all the videos: drug dealers on the sidewalks, Louis Vuitton thieves, men promoting stolen laptops, thieves snatching a Prius’ camera in traffic, porch pirates. porch pirates, porch pirates ad infinitum, all indexed in the “Lawless San Francisco” segment of the great Internet video store; Yes, at the time: Stig Strombeck took out the camera from his mobile phone on April 5 and hit record.
It’s around 7 p. m. , and Strombeck is on his way to his second job. It’s not the prominent winding segment over the hill, but the broad glove that runs toward the Golden Gate Bridge through the community of Marina: the tasteful community of courtesans and boat boys and Gavin Newsom and largely law-and-order Democrats. (“Everybody likes to shit in San Francisco, and San Franciscans like to shit in the marina,” one resident told me. “It’s a victimless crime. “) But lately, even at the marina, there’s no escaping the rest of the city’s troubles. Last November, at a well-kept playground just two blocks from where Strombeck walked, a father said his 10-month-old baby had ingested fentanyl and had to be resuscitated with Narcan, a nadir in San Francisco who, to the presumed relief of civil society boosters, did not appear in the film.
On the sidewalk in Lombard, Strombeck pulled his headphones from his ears and pointed his camera at a disturbing scene unfolding in the parking lot of a Shell gas station. Here’s the video: A middle-aged man, 5’11”, 230 pounds, confronts a homeless guy in his twenties wielding a 3-foot-long stick. A man’s older bear raises his arms like a boxer while the younger one plays with the stick and falls backwards from a sidewalk. , and then slowly stands up. The older looks away and yells, “You’re going to jail, you son of a bitch. “The youngest, who is dressed in a bright red beanie, punches a guy’s bear in the face, sending it away. Run to the side. An off-camera male voice says “Dude!”- Wtf unmistakable Greek chorus, it’s crazy. The younger one looks into the camera. The video stops.
⚠️ The following videos include graphic content, which some readers may find disturbing.
Strombeck put his phone away, but the action continued to spread to other images. A daycare security camera showed the man in a red cap, chasing the now-bloodied guy down the sidewalk in Lombard before punching him again. A neighbor pointed his camera from the third floor. The younger one walked down with the stick in one hand and what appears to be the older one’s baseball cap in the other, waving his arm, searching excitedly. Another video of the attacker, which appears to have been filmed from a passing vehicle, uploaded to the crime alert app Citizen, who contacted a software engineer sitting on his couch a few blocks away, who ventured outside and filmed the purple drops and Rorschach bloodstains dripping onto the sidewalk. (Strombeck would later testify via At the end of the attack, the tall guy was covered in “more blood than I’ve ever seen. “)
The next day, Marina’s neighbor, Joan, wrote on Nextdoor that she is the mother of Don Carmignani, the guy who had been pierced with the pole: “I have to thank all the neighbors who filmed what happened and were worried about preventing it. If they weren’t there, my son would be dead! Don in the hospital, he wrote, with a fractured skull and a damaged jaw. The city’s politicians tweeted prayers and called for more police. Local news news knew Carmignani as a former city fire chief, longtime San Francisco resident and father of two. The assailant: Garret Doty, 24, who recently arrived from Louisiana.
The attack reportedly began when Carmignani asked other homeless people to move away from his elderly parents’ door, which they were blocking. On a television newscast, a journalist mentions an accusation, by one of Doty’s coworkers, that Carmignani had used “bear spray” during the altercation. The segment then cuts to a close-up interview with Doty’s homeless friend, a red-bearded guy named Nate Roye, speaking under a dirty sheepskin hood, saying that Doty attacked because Carmignani had been “disrespectful. “
“Is that beating him up?” the reporter asks incredulously.
Matt Jancer
knight
Jason Parham
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“Yes, sometimes,” Roye replies decisively.
San Franciscans know the biggest drama as this episode progresses, and you probably know it too: the gleaming Tech Citadel, fallen, with the images showing it. Less than 40 hours after the attack on Marina, in some other exclusive component of the city. , a much-admired tech executive named Bob Lee, former CTO of Square and founder of Cash App, had walked past surveillance cameras while bleeding from stab wounds and later died in hospital. The two mutilations: a beat-and-shoot commissioner, a murdered executive technician — he made national headlines, putting San Francisco under the national surveillance he’s accustomed to, with lip-sucking schadenfreude from the right. Then again, it was Newsom and Nancy Pelosi’s catastrophic looping dystopia, where remote technicians and fugitive billionaires ceded the city to IRL Grand Theft Auto.
Carmignani, his family, his lawyer and some witnesses provided photographs that circulated in reports and social media: the video of Strombeck from the gas station. Street camera view of Doty’s laundromat taking out steel bar from a trash can and practicing. The nursery camera. In the community itself, the vigorous resurgence of these photographs encouraged a kind of hope. The citizens of the marina, who feared being seen as Karens with pearls, thought that they nevertheless had irrefutable proof that things had evidently gotten out of control. “Someone was hit. It was filmed in several locations,” one of them told me. “Like the most productive evidence!”
But as the days passed, the clarity crumbled. In the case of tech executive Bob Lee, police didn’t arrest a user on the street, but a tech entrepreneur whose sister was dating Lee. And privately, within the police, Carmignani’s attack also deviated from the narrative. A police sergeant, reviewing the symphony of surveillance clips that captured the disc’s fall, played footage of a police officer who had questioned Carmignani’s friend after the attack. The officer asks him if he found out when Carmignani arrived. He goes out to “confront” the boy. She says yes. Then, from the ambulance, Carmignani interrupts him by barking a command through his damaged jaw, seeming to complicate the plot:
“Don’t tell anyone. Don’t tell any cop, anybody.
Matt Jancer
knight
Jason Parham
knight
In San Francisco, there’s another video. New York and London are famous for being covered by government-controlled security cameras, but surveillance here is different: it’s as privatized as it is ubiquitous, a full-scale Hitchcock garden window culture.
In the city where Nextdoor’s offices are located in the downtown Tenderloin, sharing footage of porch burglars with Ring cameras is an exercise in attracting neighbors who have never met. Across the city, local nonprofits oversee camera networks throughout the neighborhood, funded in part through donations. crypto entrepreneur Chris Larsen. (“It’s the winning formula,” Larsen told The New York Times in 2020. “Pure Cover”). Squads of Waymo self-driving cars roam the streets like ghosts of Pac-Man, collecting video feeds to retrieve as evidence. You can watch a resident’s live cam to see who’s on the corner of Hyde and Ellis lately.
True-crime videos have become San Francisco’s civic language, the usual vocabulary of local TV news, the acid joke of a million social media posts. The flows intensified the pandemic, as streets without commuters were filled with man-made opioid use and property crime. Since then, the city has been hampered by successive collapses: police shortages, a 34% unemployment rate at workplaces, a federal order seriously restricting the city’s ability to clean up homeless encampments. As it turns out, no one is solving San Francisco’s problems. It turns out that, through God, other people will film the malfunction and post the footage.
A man named J. J. Smith is probably the most brilliant personification of this motivation. A longtime Tenderloin resident whose brother died of a fentanyl overdose in 2022, Smith (not his true calling) films other homeless people while trying to cajole them into treatment. He then posts the photographs to X, where he has around 19,000 followers.
In happier cases, you’ll document the moment when other people sign up for a program and come out innocent on the other side. But many of Smith’s photographs are much darker: forensics removing sheet-wrapped corpses from residential hotels; A bloodless slit in a woman’s face as she overdosed on a sidewalk. Smith explains that he has just given Narcan to the woman, plunging him into a morbid suspense combined with a terrible sense of “Do we intend to see this?Other times, Smith says, a tough love turns into trolling, like when he ripped off a coat covering a woman’s head to bleed her out from smoking drugs next to a park where her children play.
Matt Jancer
knight
Jason Parham
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People forget about statistics, Smith says, but “when you see them, you literally hit yourself. “His supporters attribute a humanitarian crisis to him. Critics tweet at him and even reprimand him on camera: he exploits other people with photographs who have no privacy. they have not given their consent. (Hey, he says, it’s a public sidewalk. )
A campsite on a beach near San Francisco’s Marina District.
This content can also be viewed on the site where it originated.
In other words: everything that is “captured” through the camera is, in fact, on some level, liberated – in spaces slightly reflected upon by the user filming it. In the Carmignani neighborhood, on several hills and a few kilometers from the Tenderloin, a different culture of surveillance reigns: more prominent and hyperlocal, less designed for maximum algorithmic consumption, but just as aggressive. It’s guarded by an ubiquitous retiree in her sixties named Patricia Vaughey, a woman who has little outdoor social media presence. But even in Marina, the rule applies: video can seem like a means of control, but it can also cause chaos.
Officially, Patricia Vaughey is the longtime president of a group of merchants and marina neighbors. Unofficially, she is the self-proclaimed mother of the marina. Vaughey doesn’t like the term “Karen”; He prefers an older title: “The Grump. “Originally from Mississippi and arriving in 1969, she radiates joy and deep fear in her blue eyes and speaks with the force of a steamroller.
For decades, Vaughey says, he felt compassion for the few homeless people who roamed the swanky department stores and restaurants of Chestnut Street, where he once ran a gift shop. He asked them if they were looking for something social or a job; If they weren’t causing trouble, she wouldn’t call the police. “You have to be fair,” he says.
Matt Jancer
knight
Jason Parham
knight
Like other marina dwellers, Vaughey began counting many more people living on the streets, allegedly using harder drugs. The marina had theories: They were derived from the Lombard Street motels where the city had housed other homeless people during the pandemic. Tenderloin, which had fallen into such a lawlessness of tents and fentanyl that the mayor declared a state of emergency. Maybe they even brought them from other cities. (Several people I’ve spoken to are convinced this is happening; Vaughey is thinking about setting up his own camera. )
The emails landed in the inbox of Catherine Stefani, the City Council’s marina manager. Posts about drug dealers, a guy with a knife, cases of public indecency. Carmignani wrote to request an appeal related to “a homeless consumer and a sex act. “Naturally, the Navy began taking photographs: tents covered Safeway. A user smoking drugs in the baseball stands at Moscone Park. Campers illegally parked on Marina Boulevard. Men passed out in outdoor dining rooms, burning drug leaves on their knees.
Vaughey emailed police: “WE NEED A STRATEGY!!!!!She created an ad hoc network of neighbors who roamed other areas of the marina, some on their daily walks with their dogs or their physical exercises, investigating other homeless people. And the network persists to this day. If a member sees someone breaking an express law (blocking sidewalks in violation of disability codes is a major issue), they call the police. If a homeless user seems “mental,” as Vaughey puts it, a volunteer can call the non-emergency police line to have someone come check on them, or Vaughey makes the call herself. Some volunteers have a habit of asking other homeless people if they are willing to move into a shelter or settle for medical help. And then check to do it if they say yes.
Always and above all: Vaughey needs photos and videos. “You have to show that you have a problem,” he says. (Also, the organization is trying to figure out who they’ve approached. )If a neighbor texts him but can’t send him photos, or if he mentions a bad habit on Nextdoor without proof, Vaughey runs down the 48 steps of his fourth-floor apartment to retrieve the message. It can be seen from the driver’s seat of your Chevrolet Spark.
Matt Jancer
knight
Jason Parham
knight
Where do all the photographs go? Not far away, usually. Vaughey says he sends them on a security patrol that neighbors pay to watch their homes. Sometimes to the police. (Vaughey to district police in 2020: “30 members of our organization spent more than a month taking photographs to document the activities of drug traffickers and their suppliers, as well as their travel routes. Our organization has documented as many homeless people as possible. “)At the very least, it helps keep them registered for long-term reference and writes occasional updates to their favorite social network. “I’m a public figure,” one guy who lived in a tent off the coast of Lombard told me. I’m pretty well-known on the Nextdoor app. “
But the undisputed stars of the Navy surveillance files are a couple named Nate Roye, the guy in the sheepskin hood, and Ashley Buck. Or as Vaughey calls them: “the worst ever known. “
Roye and Buck came to the community around 2019, after Roye took a Greyhound from North Carolina and met Buck somewhere along the way. They set up camp outside a Walgreens in Lombard, where, according to an employee in court documents, he smoked methamphetamine, disappointed consumers and yelled at each other. Buck would come into the store and borrow things (ice cream, Red Bull, cookies) for 30 minutes, and get away with $205 worth of makeup, spewing vitriol. Her (she was never officially accused of shoplifting).
Other court cases over the couple’s alleged misdeeds piled up in manager Stefani’s inbox: Roye had thrown a steel object at pedestrians; that it had been “exposed” in the presence of young people on Halloween; that he had hit a guy with a tree branch who was threatening to call the police. Both had been involved in local delinquent cases: Buck was charged with shoplifting, but the case was dropped; Roye pleaded no contest to the hooliganism charges, spent brief stints in jail and was released on parole, but they ended up on the street.
I went to contact Roye several times. He downplayed his arguments with neighbors. “They just don’t like company. Sometimes it’s just a few people. When he jokes with people, he says, “Actually, it’s just for fun,” and smokes meth “all day long. each and every day. ” Buck, for his part, didn’t need to communicate: the first time I approached her for an interview, she asked me to wait “around the corner” for a verbal exchange that never happened; Later, he said “I think you’re for the other one. . . “She’s somewhere around the corner, we can plan anything soon.
Matt Jancer
knight
Jason Parham
knight
While most of the influx of other homeless people at the marina in Covid times had dissipated around 2022, Vaughey’s network continued to track down the die-hard. Specifically, Vaughey patrolled his Spark at least once a day to take pictures of where Buck and Roye were. Sitting in a Marina pizzeria this summer, I asked Vaughey where the duo was. While there, he texted a woman in his network, who called with the answer. )In addition to surveillance, Vaughey has also worked from other angles: at the finish line. At his request, a Walgreens worker filed for a restraining order against Buck and Roye. When Vaughey posted the news on Nextdoor, Marina was elated: “Thank you for everything you do. “
As the restraining order made its way through the court, Buck and Roye simply made their way to the domain around Magnolia Street, near Carmignani’s home, where a new organization of Marina citizens had to deal with their growing whirlwind of recovered pieces and opera scenes. .
A neighbor I’ll call Dana, a tech company executive who’s been on the run from her rent-controlled apartment for thirteen years, was particularly upset by Roye’s tendency to berate Buck for free. One day, after Dana saw the police arrest Roye, she approached Buck on the sidewalk: “If there’s ever a time for you to get out,” Dana told him, to escape this cycle, “it’s now. “It’s the rare olive branch: one day, the couple’s screams brought Dana to tears of frustration. that he felt like a hostage in his own home. The couple was caught in a kind of impasse that, from a distance, could motivate pathos, but the lived reality, right outside their window, deflected Dana’s empathy. Nate and Ashley! It’s a natural chaos, with impunity and widespread contempt,” he said. Dana hates being jaded: “I hate them because they made me hate them. “
But the duo wasn’t without their peers. Earlier this year, some neighbors in the community of Carmignani spotted a new long-haired boy who started dating the couple, more quietly, on a bike: Garret Doty.
Doty refused to speak to me (through his lawyer), but his odyssey to Magnolia Street can be partially reconstructed through video. On Nov. 9, 2022, he drove a stolen Texas-registered application truck to a Border Patrol checkpoint in New Mexico and was arrested. to be questioned. In a taped interview with a state trooper, a positive Doty says he’s headed toward Route 66, toward Tucson, and then into San Francisco. Have you ever heard that song by that woman: “She never looks back with her rearview mirror ripped off and her left foot on the gas,” she says. “That’s pretty much how I feel. “
Matt Jancer
knight
Jason Parham
knight
Agents traced his arrest history in Acadia Parish, Louisiana. He had been charged with domestic violence and strangulation at the age of 20, as well as obstruction of a public passage and resisting arrest at the age of 22, but all charges were dropped.
An officer noticed that Doty had injuries to his face and suspected he was drugged. Doty claimed that he did not use any drugs. Doty gave confusing answers about how the van was delivered to him; His temperament zigzagged from cheerful to restless. The state police officer eventually told his colleagues, with the camera on, that Doty might want an intellectual aptitude test at a hospital before sending him to jail. (Doty pleaded not guilty to a fee of attempted ownership of a stolen vehicle, which was later dismissed. )
Police frame camera footage of a New Mexico state police officer questioning Doty while he was in custody in November 2022. (Note: Audio retention is provided on video played on WIRED as part of a registration request. )
The security camera of this laundromat captured the altercation between Doty and Carmignani.
The Shell station Stig Strombeck filmed the encounter between Doty and Carmignani.
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