SF Crypto Billionaire Wants to Donate Millions for Police Drones, Surveillance Efforts

San Francisco police commissioners on Wednesday will consider a crypto billionaire’s offer of nearly $9.4 million to fund increased surveillance efforts, reigniting questions about the ethics of both the controversial technology and large private donations for public programs.

The funds would come from cryptocurrency company Ripple and the San Francisco Police Community Foundation, a nonprofit created by Ripple co-founder Chris Larsen, who has been a prominent supporter of new SFPD technology efforts.

If approved, the donation would provide new downtown office space for the Police Department’s surveillance unit, dubbed the Real Time Investigations Center, and funding for a dozen officer-operated drones to add to the fleet it brought online last summer, among other technology.

Roughly $2.13 million of the donation would be in the form of a cost-free sublease of Ripple’s former office space at 315 Montgomery St. Currently, the RTIC operates out of the Hall of Justice, but according to the resolution before the Police Commission, the run-down building has hampered the unit’s ability to make use of its new technologies.

Larsen said the space has “such bad infrastructure that the police today literally lose connectivity to their drones while they’re trying to chase a suspect and that ruins the chase.”

Ripple’s existing lease doesn’t expire until December 2026, but the company relocated into a larger space on Battery Street in Jackson Square in 2022. Until the paid-for rental expires, Larsen said he saw an opportunity to “help out” the Police Department.

He said that after next December, it will be up to SFPD to decide whether to keep and pay for the space.

The remaining $7.25 million would go toward the purchase of new drones and installation of technology upgrades in the space, provided by the San Francisco Community Police Foundation. The legislation would also waive the city’s competitive bidding requirement that would generally apply to the Police Department’s purchases of equipment, technology or services.

Larsen created the foundation, which was formed last year to support the San Francisco Police Department, but does not sit on its board.

Critics of the donation say that it allows wealthy citizens to “buy” policies they want the city to adopt.

“There is a rich person bankrolling technology that police are going to buy and use in the city, also without any democratic approval,” said Matthew Guariglia, a senior policy analyst at the digital privacy nonprofit Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Larsen disagrees that the donation overrides community input. He said it has to go through four levels of oversight — the foundation’s board cleared the funding, and along with the sublease, will now have to gain the approval of the Police Commission, Board of Supervisors, and Mayor Daniel Lurie.

Lurie has expressed support for RTIC and its technology, announcing at an April press conference that SFPD plans to expand the unit in the coming months and crediting its work in part for the city’s drop in crime.

“RTIC has already supported hundreds of arrests, with crime down 30% citywide, and with this new facility, the SFPD will have the tools and the technology it needs to take this work to the next level and help our officers keep our streets safe,” he said in a statement.

Many of the tools the money would fund were also backed by San Francisco voters through the passage of Proposition E, which expanded SFPD’s ability to use surveillance technology and diminished the Police Commission’s power. It received 54% approval last March.

Since then, the RTIC unit has assisted in more than 500 arrests and prevented “numerous” police pursuits, according to the resolution.

“Some of these tools … have been really effective at catching these professional smash-and-grab crews that run roughshod over the city,” Larsen told KQED. “You’ve seen that now in the numbers: over 20% drop from last year in smash-and-grabs, last year was the lowest murder rate since the 1960s.”

Guariglia pointed out that the decline in smash-and-grab robberies isn’t unique to San Francisco. Nationally, property crime was down 8.4% in 2024, according to the Public Policy Institute of California, and it has continued to fall this year.

He said increased surveillance can easily have a disproportionate and negative impact on poorer, more vulnerable communities, depending on where the technology is placed.

“If you live in a neighborhood with more surveillance … they are open to police harassment for jaywalking, for littering, a lot of really small minor things that are actionable for officers, but if you live in fancier neighborhoods up the hill with less cameras, you can get away with,” he said.

Larsen said he understands that concern, but believes that San Francisco’s public safety policy has swung too far on both sides of the pendulum in recent years, from over- to under-policing. The current surveillance technology, he said, can be used in a conscious way.

“The concern for the pendulum swinging too far the other way again is a valid one,” he said. “There’s a lot of room here to make sure that the police have the tools they need for their basic job, but everybody has to be concerned about it going too far, and we are, too.”