I moved to San Francisco for the Doom Loop
I moved to San Francisco in 1996. I quickly became part of a group of people led by my friend Desmond Crisis called the Otaku Patrol Group. We were all radio enthusiasts and technology fetishists who also wore a lot of leather. Desmond had kind of spliced a lot of old police equipment into the dashboard of his black Pontiac Fiero and one day I was watching him tune a really old navigation system he’d salvaged. This was before GPS, and the nav system figured out how far you’d traveled by counting how many times a magnet glued to his drum brake went by a relay switch. As he played with it, the radio crackled to life and a police dispatcher called out a 10–55 in Laguna Honda Reservoir — a dead body. Desmond suggested we test the new nav system by driving to the artificial lake. That was my first experience with police scanners and it made an impression on me. Evidently, I made an impression on Desmond too because he still tells the story of how he felt like I was just not even noticing the stench as they pulled that poor person out of the water.
I grew up just south of Atlanta and never really liked driving a lot, which is why I gravitated to city life as soon as I left home. Part of what I love about city life is how chaotic it is. Atlanta was chaotic but never enough for my liking — but a visit to San Francisco in the early '90s to interview Cliff Stoll convinced me that I needed to move to San Francisco ASAP. I also had a huge interest in true crime, and when Desmond introduced me to the scanner frequencies here in San Francisco I threw myself into that hobby for a while.
One of the recordings Desmond made was of the police traffic during a November 1995 rampage by Victor Boutwell. A man living out of his van amassed an arsenal consisting of Belgian FN FNC and Steyr AUG assault rifles modified to be full auto, a Glock, a Colt 45 semiauto, and a UZI 9mm in addition to full body armor. In 25 minutes he shot a homeless man, two police officers (one killed, one wounded), and a paramedic responding to the scene while it took many shots to penetrate the body armor he’d put on. The tapes I listened to were chilling and enough to make me buy a radio to listen to more police scanners.
Full disclosure: I did not buy a police scanner. I bought a ham radio and modified it to listen and transmit on police frequencies, because I am a ham radio geek.
I was living at the corner of Steiner and McCallister and would listen to the police scanner in my neighborhood. There is a bit of an addictive nature to it, but there is also a point where you have to step back for your sanity. For everything that makes the news in San Francisco, there are many more incidents that do not. The police scanner is a constant stream of police calls. These days there is an app called Citizen that cherry-picks scanner calls — but from my experience, there should be far more calls on Citizen if it were to be an accurate representation of how many incidents police have to respond to.
The reason I’m bringing this up is that there is a subset of “influencers” in San Francisco these days who want to paint this police scanner activity as something abnormal or out of place in a densely populated city. They listen to scanners and respond to incidents the way Desmond and I did that first day we hung out. The police call these folks “scanner chasers”, and they include legitimate journalists as well as the “instant crowd” that always shows up at a crime scene. The difference is that these folks have a fantasy that they are being “influencers” when in fact they are being deeply disrespectful by posting pictures and video. I am sure that if the owner of the Deli Board were to get hit by a truck tomorrow, he would not want someone turning his smashed head into a TikTok video. Yet this is exactly the sort of thing these folks are doing — using video of the worst days of some person’s life and using it to make money off the algorithm.
It’s worth remembering that any narrative can be framed with these videos. And there’s a lot of scanner traffic to chase in a city this size — it’s a cynical side hustle for people who are desperate to make money any way they can.
For at least one of these grifters, I understand the grift. During the early 2000s, I worked for Lou Gordon of RSN. RSN is a non-profit that Lou founded after he served time for getting in trouble with drugs. During that time, several programs existed to help folks like Lou found organizations helping other people re-entering society. At least one of the current batch of influencers comes from this background and has figured out how to use this to set up a non-profit to take donations from right-wing PACs and other dark money. They do nothing but push their agenda via propaganda in San Francisco. There are more than a few interconnections between all these people, but the main takeaway is that they are really only big on Twitter and Twitter is less than half as influential as it used to be. This narrative is part of a concerted effort by a small group of tech founders that are trying to break into the political machine. When they don’t have non-profits, these doom loop influencers are getting money from this group via crowdfunding platforms. The spider web is a little too complex to fit into this narrative but better people than me are documenting it. I believe that the vast majority of people are decent people and decent people reject this form of poverty porn. The folks that relish it are actually very sick and all follow these influencers. It’s a cynical ploy to paint politicians they want to replace as doing nothing — when the actual people doing nothing are the police who pick easy beats like Union Square instead of the Tenderloin.
I came to this conclusion after giving up on the sheer volume of crime I heard on the scanners. You will slowly go more manic if you pay attention to all the police calls out there, even in 1996 this was the case. There is enough of a firehose to shape any narrative in a big city, and people need to be aware of this. Living at Pier 39 means I get to see lots of bad behavior and I have to intervene in some bad behavior as well when people jump onto the docks and into the water. This is just part of living in a major city and being a good neighbor.
Being a good neighbor does not include publicizing photos when bad things happen. I’ve helped pull three living people out of the water here at the pier and watched as two bodies were recovered in the 12 years I’ve spent here. In the 30 years I’ve lived in San Francisco I’ve been mugged twice and pickpocketed once. I get more than enough action just existing in this tourist area, to be honest tourists behave rather badly. I stopped listening to scanners about 6 months after I started and found that I encounter enough crime and drama without it. What made me stop listening to police scanners? That’s easy. It was the night I tuned in to hear about a person two blocks away from my apartment committing armed robbery at the McDonald’s across from the police station with a meat hook. In 1997.
San Francisco has always had the doom loop. It’s the normal cycle of things. We’ve always had homeless people as well. The first civil disturbance in San Francisco was an 1855 riot by homeless miners after the Gold Rush collapsed. The authorities tried to clear them off a lot at Stockton and Green Street and had to call out the army to get things under control. The nickname for Jack Kerouac Alley was “Murder Alley” because a murder a day used to happen there. San Francisco has much improved, although crazy people with assault rifles still worry me. It’s an interesting city and crime is not always what it seems here. I moved here for the waitress who was shot over poached eggs. I moved here for the heiress who was kidnapped and brainwashed. I moved here for the uncaught serial killer. I moved here for the district attorney who used to get into fistfights. I moved here for the inevitable earthquake and complete destruction of the city. I moved here for the wonderful anarchy that comes with living cheek-to-jowl with 750,000 other people in a seven square mile area. If you don’t love the doom loop, you can always just leave.
Me? I moved here for the doom loop.
