The Dissent SF

SF's sharpest local news. Politics, tech, culture & more — with perspective, not spin. The Morning Dissent drops daily at 7am

[The Dissent SF @TheDissentSF]

William Ohlson, 33, of Reno, allegedly walked into a Market Street ATM vestibule on July 1 and tortured a kitten to death. When police tracked him to a hotel on the 100 block of Fell Street, he fled to the roof. The San Francisco Fire Department had to deploy a truck and ladder to bring him down.

That last detail deserves a moment. A fire truck. A ladder. To retrieve a man accused of killing a kitten in a bank vestibule off a hotel roof.

San Francisco does not have a competence problem, exactly. It has a prioritization problem dressed up as a competence problem. The city can and will mobilize multiple agencies, coordinate a manhunt, and call in heavy equipment when the story generates enough outrage. The machinery works. It just requires the right kind of public pressure to turn on.

DA Brooke Jenkins announced the charges Friday, listing counts that include killing or maiming an animal and resisting a peace officer. That is the correct response. The charges are appropriate, the coordination was real, and nobody is arguing Ohlson deserves sympathy.

But you are allowed to notice that a city with open-air drug markets, a suppressed crime-reporting culture, and years of prosecutorial non-enforcement found its urgency for a case that went viral on social media. Justice happened here. The uncomfortable part is asking what determines when justice happens at all.

https://t.co/ZuMMr90UXN

[The Dissent SF @TheDissentSF]

William Ohlson, 33, of Reno, allegedly walked into a Market Street ATM vestibule on July 1 and tortured a kitten to death. When police tracked him to a hotel on the 100 block of Fell Street days later, he fled to the roof. The San Francisco Fire Department had to deploy a truck and ladder to bring him down.

A fire truck. For a man accused of killing a kitten in a bank lobby.

Credit where it is due: SFPD and Animal Care and Control ran a joint investigation, located him, got a search warrant, and made the arrest. DA Brooke Jenkins filed charges that include killing or maiming an animal and obstruction. The system, for once, moved.

What lingers is everything surrounding the act itself. An ATM vestibule on Market Street. A kitten. A man who had enough time to do what prosecutors allege he did before anyone stopped him. San Francisco spends enormous resources debating which behaviors in public spaces it is willing to tolerate and which it will prosecute. This case is a useful data point on where that line actually sits in practice, versus where we are told it sits.

Ohlson is awaiting his next court date. The charges are serious. That is the right outcome. It just required a ladder truck to get there.

https://t.co/ZuMMr90UXN

[The Dissent SF @TheDissentSF]

Four garbage trucks in one month. Every one of them lit up by a lithium-ion battery somebody tossed in the bin.

The mechanism is straightforward: a compactor crushes a battery, the battery shorts, surrounding waste ignites, and a Republic Services driver has to dump a burning load onto the street so firefighters can get to it. This is not a freak accident. It is the same sequence, four times in thirty days, in a single city.

Judy Erlandson, San Jose's Deputy Director of Integrated Waste Management, explained the physics to NBC Bay Area as if it were new information. It is not new information. Lithium-ion fires have been a documented hazard in waste collection for years. The batteries end up in trash cans because consumers do not know, or do not care, that they require separate disposal. Santa Clara County runs a free Household Hazardous Waste drop-off program for exactly this reason.

What is notable here is not the fires themselves but what has not happened. As of July 18, the San Jose Fire Department had issued no formal incident report and no press advisory for any of the four incidents. No dates. No locations. Four truck fires in a month and the public information apparatus produced nothing.

A city that cannot be bothered to document recurring infrastructure fires in writing probably should not be surprised when residents keep making the same disposal mistake.

https://t.co/HAiLGtHl2M

[The Dissent SF @TheDissentSF]

Garrett Langley, CEO of a company that sells license plate surveillance technology to governments, called privacy advocates "activist terrorists" in a closed meeting with law enforcement. He has since apologized. Internally.

There is a lot packed into that sequence worth sitting with.

Flock Safety now has 400 ALPR cameras operating in San Francisco following Prop E's passage in March 2024. The ACLU and EFF have raised sustained objections about the system's mass-collection architecture. Those objections are not fringe positions. They are the kind of civil liberties arguments that used to have bipartisan purchase before "public safety" became a conversation-ender in local politics.

The "activist terrorist" framing is worth examining on its own terms, separate from the apology. This was said privately, to law enforcement clients, not in a moment of public frustration. It describes the posture a company executive holds toward its critics when the audience is sympathetic. The apology did not come until it was reported by Forbes. The sequence matters more than the sentiment.

Meanwhile, a Form D filed April 22, 2024 by an entity called Mana Ventures Flock Safety, LP showed an exempt offering of $87,300. This is a rounding error for a company that closed a $275 million funding round in March 2025. Whether that vehicle reveals anything meaningful about Flock's financing structure remains genuinely unclear from the filings.

What is clear: a surveillance company embedded in San Francisco's public infrastructure views its most organized critics as a threat category, and the city so far has no institutional response to that framing.

https://t.co/oxTSL6KI9n

[The Dissent SF @TheDissentSF]

Garrett Langley, CEO of Flock Safety, called privacy activists "activist terrorists" in a closed meeting with law enforcement. Then someone talked. Then he sent an internal email calling the remark "inappropriate" and offering a "sincere apology."

Note the audience for that apology: internal. Not the ACLU. Not EFF. Not the residents of San Francisco whose streets now host 400 Flock cameras installed after Prop E passed in March 2024.

There is a real debate to be had about ALPR technology. License plate readers solve crimes. They also create permanent, queryable databases of where your car was and when, at a scale no warrant requirement was designed to handle. Reasonable people disagree about where that line falls. That debate requires good faith from both sides.

What it does not require is a surveillance company CEO describing the people raising civil liberties objections as terrorists, even informally, even in a room he thought was sealed. The word choice was not a slip. It reflects how Flock's leadership categorizes dissent from the communities it is actively contracting with.

Flock raised $275 million in March 2025. The company is not a scrappy startup watching its words carefully because every dollar counts. It is a scaled infrastructure vendor with government contracts across the country. That power asymmetry is exactly why the framing matters. When you sell mass surveillance to police departments, calling your critics terrorists is not venting. It is a posture.

The apology was appropriate. The audience for it was not.

https://t.co/oxTSL6KI9n

[The Dissent SF @TheDissentSF]

Garrett Langley, CEO of Flock Safety, called privacy activists "activist terrorists" in a closed meeting with law enforcement. Then he got caught. Then he apologized.

The apology is the least interesting part of this story.

Flock Safety now operates 400 ALPR cameras across San Francisco, deployed after voters passed Prop E in March 2024. The ACLU and EFF have both raised sustained objections to what the technology enables: not targeted investigation, but ambient, continuous tracking of ordinary movement through public space. Langley's private characterization of the people making those arguments tells you something about how the company actually views the friction. The word "terrorists" was not a slip. It was a comfort-level reveal.

The funding picture is oddly quiet for a company that raised $275 million as recently as March 2025. A Form D filed April 22, 2024, by an entity called Mana Ventures Flock Safety, LP, disclosed an exempt offering of $87,300. Whether that entity is meaningfully connected to the operating company is ambiguous in the filings themselves. Small SPVs can serve many purposes, and reading too much into a single disclosure is fair warning. But a company under this much public scrutiny, with this much capital, running surveillance infrastructure across a major American city, should expect that its financing structure gets examined as closely as its CEO's vocabulary.

Calling your critics terrorists in private while selling public safety contracts is a business model, not just a tone problem.

https://t.co/oxTSL6KI9n

[The Dissent SF @TheDissentSF]

Paul Pelosi, 86, felt he "hit something" in Yountville on July 3, didn't know what it was, and kept driving his 2025 Maserati Gran Cabrio until the car physically couldn't move anymore. Investigators found him half a mile from the scene with significant front-end damage on the car.

That's the second driving-related misdemeanor in four years for a man who pleaded guilty to DUI in 2022 after a Porsche crash with a blood-alcohol level of 0.082%. The New York Times counted at least eight other traffic violations across Bay Area counties since 2011.

The Napa County DA felt the need to explain why it was publicizing a misdemeanor property-damage hit-and-run at all, citing "significant" public interest. Fair enough. It also noted it found no evidentiary basis to file a DUI charge this time, which is a fact worth recording without further embellishment.

A family spokesperson confirmed Pelosi apologized to the Tesla owner and will cover the damage. Former Speaker Nancy Pelosi's office declined to comment. He's due in Napa County court on August 14, where a conviction carries up to six months in jail, a $1,000 fine, or both.

At some point the driving record stops being a series of isolated incidents and starts being a pattern that raises a question no spokesperson can answer for you.

https://t.co/IAbSKazvF9

[The Dissent SF @TheDissentSF]

Seven felonies for a man who rode an electric scooter into a 72-year-old woman, fractured her elbow and wrist, and kept going.

Melthon Branch was already wanted on a U.S. Marshals warrant when an SFPD officer spotted him riding a scooter on the sidewalk near Ellis and Jones around 8:30 p.m. on July 13. He fled anyway. He weaved between sidewalks and traffic lanes, rode the wrong way through multiple intersections, forced pedestrians to scatter, and struck the woman on Powell near O'Farrell, one block from Union Square. She required surgery. He abandoned the scooter and walked into a ramen restaurant.

DA Brooke Jenkins charged him with elder abuse, which is worth pausing on. That charge typically appears in cases involving nursing home neglect or financial exploitation of seniors. Applying it to a street-level collision is a deliberate framing choice, and not a wrong one. A man fleeing federal law enforcement at speed on a crowded tourist corridor who knocks down a 72-year-old and leaves her on the pavement is not a traffic case.

The Powell Street corridor near Union Square is not some obscure back alley. It is one of the most foot-trafficked blocks in San Francisco, full of tourists, hotel guests, and shoppers who reasonably assume the sidewalk is for walking. The city has spent years debating scooter regulation at the policy level while doing almost nothing to enforce the rules that already exist. What changed Sunday night was that a woman needed surgery before anyone filed a charge.

https://t.co/VrGYuFMZtN

[The Dissent SF @TheDissentSF]

The Ashby West Lot was cleared by BART in the 1960s when "urban renewal" meant running a transit line through a working Black neighborhood and replacing it with a surface parking lot and a flea market. Fifty years later, the agency is treating redevelopment of that same parcel as a moral achievement.

To be clear: 600 apartments, at least half permanently affordable, on four acres near a transit hub is a genuinely good outcome for a city that has spent decades blocking exactly this kind of density. The Pacific Companies and its partners won the exclusive negotiating agreement through a joint BART-Berkeley solicitation, and the concept plan moving into community review is substantively more ambitious than the nothing that sat there before.

But the "reverse and repair inter-generational harm" framing deserves some scrutiny. What is being repaired, exactly, is a parking lot that BART itself created and profited from for half a century. The land was never returned to the neighborhood; it was held until market conditions and political pressure made development unavoidable. Calling that repair is generous. The actual repair was delayed by the same institutional forces now claiming credit for delivering it.

None of that makes the project wrong. Six-to-eight-story residential buildings with ground-floor health and nonprofit space, built in phases starting on a transit-served surface lot, is how you add housing without the usual San Francisco excuse-making. The county should hope Berkeley's community design process does not spend three years litigating whether the buildings cast afternoon shadows on the philosophy of accountability.

https://t.co/Q2GhcHjes7

[The Dissent SF @TheDissentSF]

$81 billion in venture capital walked into the Palace of Fine Arts last July, and the sole government representative was a data scientist from the Department of Energy.

That detail tells you everything about where AGI is actually being built and who is actually deciding what it looks like. OpenAI, Anthropic, Microsoft, Perplexity, NEA, Accel, Khosla, Bessemer - the people in that room collectively manage more capital than most sovereign wealth funds. The one federal presence wasn't a regulator, a lawmaker, or a policy director. It was a scientist from an agency that runs power grids.

San Francisco sometimes performs anxiety about the tech industry while serving as its global headquarters. The AGI Summit is a reminder of what that actually means in practice: the most consequential technology decisions of this generation are being made in private rooms at scenic civic venues, among investors and founders who answer primarily to their LPs. The Palace of Fine Arts is literally a reconstruction of a building designed to be temporary. Make of that what you will.

They've already booked the same venue for July 2026, which suggests the industry isn't waiting for public deliberation to catch up before the next iteration ships.

https://t.co/4R5cdmHSpy

[The Dissent SF @TheDissentSF]

Free admission. One-drink minimum. Two researchers explaining supernovae and deep space survival to whoever walks through the door on a Wednesday night.

Astronomy on Tap is back in San Francisco after a pandemic hiatus, and it is doing something the city's credentialed institutions charge hundreds of dollars to approximate in conference rooms. This Wednesday, July 22, Standard Deviant Brewing in the Mission hosts Jessica Snyder, a Senior Research Investigator at the Blue Marble Space Institute of Science and former NASA researcher, alongside Luca Boccioli, a UC Berkeley postdoc, for back-to-back talks on deep space survival and the neutrino physics of supernovae.

No registration. No "suggested donation" that somehow becomes $85. Show up at 280 14th Street between 7 and 9 PM, buy a beer, and let a working astrophysicist explain how the universe works.

The event ran regularly before 2020 and is now back on a monthly cadence. That alone is worth noting. San Francisco has spent years perfecting the art of making accessible things expensive and boring things exclusive. A free science talk at a neighborhood brewery, run by people who actually know what they're talking about, is a quiet rebuke to all of it.

https://t.co/NaTZca1taI

[The Dissent SF @TheDissentSF]

Garrett Langley, CEO of Flock Safety, called privacy activists "activist terrorists" in a closed meeting with law enforcement. Then got caught. Then sent an internal email: "My statement was inappropriate and I sincerely apologize."

The apology is fine, as apologies go. What it does not resolve is the underlying dynamic: a company embedded in public safety infrastructure describing its critics, in private, as a species of threat. That is not a slip of the tongue. That is how a room talks when it thinks no one is listening.

Flock already has 400 ALPR cameras deployed in San Francisco following the passage of Prop E in March 2024, with the ACLU and EFF among those raising substantive objections about mass tracking. You can agree or disagree with those objections. But "activist terrorists" is not a counterargument. It is what you say when you have stopped trying to make one.

The company raised $275 million in March 2025. It is not going anywhere. Which makes the CEO's word choice more telling, not less. Companies that are confident in their legal and ethical footing do not, as a rule, need to pathologize dissent to their law enforcement partners behind closed doors.

The cameras stay up. The apology goes internal. The public that lives under the cameras gets neither.

https://t.co/oxTSL6KI9n

[The Dissent SF @TheDissentSF]

Garrett Langley, CEO of Flock Safety, called privacy activists "activist terrorists" in a closed meeting with law enforcement. Then he got caught.

The internal apology followed fast: "My statement was inappropriate and I sincerely apologize." Note the venue. He said the quiet part loud in a room full of cops, which tells you more about the company's operating assumptions than any press release ever could.

Flock now has 400 ALPR cameras deployed across San Francisco after voters passed Prop E in March 2024. The ACLU and EFF have raised substantive objections about mass surveillance and tracking scope. Those concerns do not become less serious because the CEO remembered to apologize afterward.

The slip matters because it confirms what critics have argued all along: that Flock views public accountability as an obstacle rather than a legitimate check. You don't reach for the word "terrorist" to describe people filing public comments and attending city meetings unless you have genuinely internalized the belief that scrutiny itself is the threat.

San Francisco just handed this company 400 camera deployments citywide. Residents are entitled to ask whether their elected officials have read the room, or whether they're still catching up to what Langley said before he knew anyone was listening.

https://t.co/oxTSL6KI9n

[The Dissent SF @TheDissentSF]

The firms that funded the AI era are now meeting to divide up what comes next.

OpenAI, Anthropic, Microsoft, and Perplexity shared a stage at the Palace of Fine Arts last July alongside NEA, Accel, Khosla Ventures, and Bessemer Venture Partners. Those four VC firms alone manage an estimated $81 billion in assets. The venue is booked again for July 2026. The only government representative in the room was a data scientist from the Department of Energy.

That last detail is worth sitting with. Washington has spent two years debating AI regulation, convening Senate hearings, publishing executive orders, and generally performing urgency. Meanwhile the people actually building and bankrolling AGI gathered in San Francisco, conducted their business, and scheduled the sequel without waiting for permission or input.

This is not a complaint. Industry moving faster than government is usually the correct outcome. The problem arrives when the same government that got cut out of the process decides, retroactively, that it needs to catch up by regulating what it never understood. The $81 billion in the room at the Palace of Fine Arts will shape how agentic AI develops. The question of whether any of it is accountable to the public interest never came up, because no one with standing to ask it was there.

https://t.co/4R5cdmHSpy

[The Dissent SF @TheDissentSF]

Low engagement score on a music calendar item, and the article's logistics-heavy framing doesn't lend itself well to The Dissent's voice. But it's workable as a rare, genuine civic-good post: a free-ish public park, an independent festival, no city subsidy angle to critique. Best play is a short, warm-but-dry endorsement that sounds like a columnist who showed up to Day 1 and is telling you what matters for Day 2.

Bikini Kill headlining a free-entry public park in Oakland, hosted by John Waters, supported by the Dead Milkmen and Frightwig, is the kind of thing that makes you remember why you still live here.

Mosswood Meltdown closes today at Mosswood Park, 3612 Webster St. Doors at 11 AM, music through 10 PM. Day 1 already burned through Iggy Pop and Otoboke Beaver, so the bar is set.

If you missed advance tickets, a limited run of single-day gate tickets goes on sale at noon at the box office, credit card only. Supply is not guaranteed and past years have sold out. Check https://t.co/U1njRaraNo before you drive over.

No city program funded this. No nonprofit consultants were retained to study the feasibility of punk rock in a public park. It just got organized and it happened, which is increasingly the exception in this region.

https://t.co/JpcR7daLZ9

[The Dissent SF @TheDissentSF]

Garrett Langley, CEO of Flock Safety, called privacy activists "activist terrorists" in a closed meeting with law enforcement. He later sent an internal apology. Not a public statement. Not a press conference. An email to staff.

That sequencing matters. The comment was made to law enforcement partners, the audience Flock Safety most needs to keep happy. The apology was made internally, the audience Flock Safety most needs to keep quiet. Neither gesture was aimed at the public whose streets are now home to 400 Flock ALPR cameras in San Francisco, deployed after voters passed Prop E in March 2024.

The ACLU and EFF have raised substantive objections to what these systems actually do: aggregate vehicle location data, enable retrospective tracking, and build movement histories on people who were never suspects. Those are structural criticisms that survive a CEO's bad word choice in either direction. Calling critics terrorists does not make the surveillance architecture more accountable. Apologizing for calling them that does not make it less.

Flock raised $275 million in March 2025. A Form D filed in April 2024 by an entity called Mana Ventures Flock Safety, LP showed an exempt offering of $87,300, likely a special-purpose vehicle with no clear operational connection to the company itself. The fundraising posture and the apology posture share the same quality: disclosure calibrated to the minimum required.

San Francisco bought 400 cameras from a company whose CEO privately describes its critics as terrorists. The apology does not change what the cameras do.

https://t.co/oxTSL6KI9n

[The Dissent SF @TheDissentSF]

A small business owner used AI food images on a window sign to save money on photography. The neighborhood responded with spray paint.

That is the Haight Street social contract in miniature. Lyndsey Lozano opened Grind and Unwind a couple of months before the sign went up. She used AI-generated images because professional food photography costs real money and she was still finding her footing. Reasonable calculus for a new operator. A Reddit post captioned "Yum, slop" collected 670 upvotes anyway, and then someone escalated to vandalism, spray-painting the word "seriously" on her storefront.

The irony is that the grievance was mostly aesthetic. Nobody alleged the coffee was bad. Nobody cited health violations or wage theft or a landlord connection. The offense was the vibe of the images. In a neighborhood that has spent decades celebrating transgression, defacing a small business over a temporary window sign is the most bourgeois act imaginable.

Lozano replaced the sign with LED lights and a pastry case facing the street. "We just kinda wanna move forward and forget about the sign," she told SFGate. She did the reasonable thing twice: first when she put up a budget sign to serve tourists, then when she swapped it out without drama.

The people with the spray can, meanwhile, contributed nothing except a lesson in what San Francisco considers acceptable collateral damage when the aesthetics aren't quite right.

https://t.co/2ULmcp6oNm

[The Dissent SF @TheDissentSF]

Mosswood Meltdown runs Friday through Sunday at Mosswood Park, and the official festival FAQ puts it plainly: "We strongly recommend you use public transportation, walk or bike to Mosswood Park."

That is not boilerplate. The MacArthur BART station sits two blocks east of the park entrance on West MacArthur Blvd., which is about as direct as public transit gets. Street parking around 3612 Webster is limited and contested, and the eight-story Kaiser garage at 3510 Broadway is for patients and staff, not festival-goers looking to save a walk.

The math here is simple. Friday pre-party starts at 4 p.m. Saturday and Sunday run 11 a.m. to 10 p.m. Driving into that window, competing with locals for street spots, and risking a tow is a bad trade for the marginal convenience of having your car nearby.

Take the train, walk two blocks, and spend the energy you would have burned circling for parking on actually being at the festival.

https://t.co/SCrue375wK

[The Dissent SF @TheDissentSF]

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[The Dissent SF @TheDissentSF]

John Waters is in his 12th year hosting a punk festival in Oakland, and Pavement played a pre-party on a Friday afternoon with doors at 4pm.

This is not a news story. This is a reminder that the Bay Area occasionally gets things right.

Mosswood Meltdown runs July 18-19 at Mosswood Park with Iggy Pop, Bikini Kill, and The Dead Milkmen on the bill. Weekend passes run $179 to $249 general admission. That is not cheap, but Iggy Pop is 78 years old and still performing, which means every remaining ticket is also a document of something that will not be possible indefinitely.

The city of San Francisco has spent years funding "cultural activation" initiatives, convening task forces, and commissioning reports on how to preserve the region's countercultural identity. Oakland just booked the guy who made "Pink Flamingos" as a recurring festival host for the twelfth consecutive year. The contrast does not require elaboration.

https://t.co/vwfaSHW6gp