A San Francisco supervisor has proposed increasing the city’s film and television tax credit to lure more productions to the Bay Area.

Board President Rafael Mandelman introduced legislation Tuesday that would create a tiered rebate system based on local spending on items like San Francisco resident wages, services or goods.

To qualify, most productions must spend a minimum of $500,000 in the city and shoot at least five days of principal photography there. Those productions also get a 100% rebate on city agency fees, including permits and police services.

Then, under the new proposal, those projects could get 10% back on the first million dollars spent in San Francisco, then 20% on any qualified local spending beyond that, said Manijeh Fata, executive director of the San Francisco Film Commission.

“As localities across the state compete to attract more film production, San Francisco must stay in the game,” Mandelman said in a statement. “Strengthening our film incentive program will keep jobs in San Francisco and help ensure this important economic activity doesn’t bypass us.”

The legislation is expected to go to a committee hearing next month, with a final vote potentially at the end of January or early February, Fata said.

Though San Francisco’s production incentive was established in 2006, the program has been “underutilized,” said Supervisor Connie Chan, who is co-sponsoring the legislation.

“I support this legislative update so we can ensure the original intent and benefits of the program can be fully materialized,” she said in a statement. “I expect the film rebate program to deliver robust job opportunities for workers, creative promotion of our City through films that will boost tourism and increase sales tax revenue with film industry spending.”

San Francisco’s incentive proposal comes five months after California increased the cap on the state’s film and television tax credit program in an attempt to curb runaway production to other states and countries.

California now allocates $750 million annually to the program, up from $330 million. Legislators also broadened the type of productions eligible to apply for the credit.

Since then, more than three dozen TV shows, including a “Baywatch” reboot, and 52 films have been awarded tax credits.

Police body cameras equipped with artificial intelligence have been trained to detect the faces of about 7,000 people on a “high risk” watch list in the Canadian city of Edmonton, a live test of whether facial recognition technology shunned as too intrusive could have a place in policing throughout North America.

But six years after leading body camera maker Axon Enterprise, Inc. said police use of facial recognition technology posed serious ethical concerns, the pilot project — switched on last week— is raising alarms far beyond Edmonton, the continent’s northernmost city of more than 1 million people.

A former chair of Axon’s AI ethics board, which led the company to temporarily abandon facial recognition in 2019, told The Associated Press he’s concerned that the Arizona-based company is moving forward without enough public debate, testing and expert vetting about the societal risks and privacy implications.

“It’s essential not to use these technologies, which have very real costs and risks, unless there’s some clear indication of the benefits,” said the former board chair, Barry Friedman, now a law professor at New York University.

Axon founder and CEO Rick Smith contends that the Edmonton pilot is not a product launch but “early-stage field research” that will assess how the technology performs and reveal the safeguards needed to use it responsibly.

“By testing in real-world conditions outside the U.S., we can gather independent insights, strengthen oversight frameworks, and apply those learnings to future evaluations, including within the United States,” Smith wrote in a blog post.

The pilot is meant to help make Edmonton patrol officers safer by enabling their body-worn cameras to detect anyone who authorities classified as having a “flag or caution” for categories such as “violent or assaultive; armed and dangerous; weapons; escape risk; and high-risk offender,” said Kurt Martin, acting superintendent of the Edmonton Police Service. So far, that watch list has 6,341 people on it, Martin said at a Dec. 2 press conference. A separate watch list adds 724 people who have at least one serious criminal warrant, he said.

“We really want to make sure that it’s targeted so that these are folks with serious offenses,” said Ann-Li Cooke, Axon’s director of responsible AI.

If the pilot expands, it could have a major effect on policing around the world. Axon, a publicly traded firm best known for developing the Taser, is the dominant U.S. supplier of body cameras and has increasingly pitched them to police agencies in Canada and elsewhere. Axon last year beat its closest competitor, Chicago-based Motorola Solutions, in a bid to sell body cameras to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.

Motorola said in a statement that it also has the ability to integrate facial recognition technology into police body cameras but, based on its ethical principles, has “intentionally abstained from deploying this feature for proactive identification.” It didn’t rule out using it in the future.

The government of Alberta in 2023 mandated body cameras for all police agencies in the province, including its capital city Edmonton, describing it as a transparency measure to document police interactions, collect better evidence and reduce timelines for resolving investigations and complaints.

While many communities in the U.S. have also welcomed body cameras as an accountability tool, the prospect of real-time facial recognition identifying people in public places has been unpopular across the political spectrum. Backlash from civil liberties advocates and a broader conversation about racial injustice helped push Axon and Big Tech companies to pause facial recognition software sales to police.

Among the biggest concerns were studies showing that the technology was flawed, demonstrating biased results by race, gender and age. It also didn’t match faces as accurately on real-time video feeds as it did on faces posing for identification cards or police mug shots.

Several U.S. states and dozens of cities have sought to curtail police use of facial recognition, though President Donald Trump’s administration is now trying to block or discourage states from regulating AI.

The European Union banned real-time public face-scanning police technology across the 27-nation bloc, except when used for serious crimes like kidnapping or terrorism.

But in the United Kingdom, no longer part of the EU, authorities started testing the technology on London streets a decade ago and have used it to make 1,300 arrests in the past two years. The government is considering expanding its use across the country.

Many details about Edmonton’s pilot haven’t been publicly disclosed. Axon doesn’t make its own AI model for recognizing faces but declined to say which third-party vendor it uses.

Edmonton police say the pilot will continue through the end of December and only during daylight hours.

“Obviously it gets dark pretty early here,” Martin said. “Lighting conditions, our cold temperatures during the wintertime, all those things will factor into what we’re looking at in terms of a successful proof of concept.”

Martin said about 50 officers piloting the technology won’t know if the facial recognition software made a match. The outputs will be analyzed later at the station. In the future, however, it could help police detect if there’s a potentially dangerous person nearby so they can call in for assistance, Martin said.

That’s only supposed to happen if officers have started an investigation or are responding to a call, not simply while strolling through a crowd. Martin said officers responding to a call can switch their cameras from a passive to an active recording mode with higher-resolution imaging.

“We really want to respect individuals’ rights and their privacy interests,” Martin said.

The office of Alberta’s information and privacy commissioner Diane McLeod said she received a privacy impact assessment from Edmonton police on Dec. 2, the same day Axon and police officials announced the program. The office said Friday it’s now working to review the assessment, a requirement for projects that collect “high sensitivity” personal data.

University of Alberta criminology professor Temitope Oriola said he’s not surprised that the city is experimenting with live facial recognition, given that the technology is already ubiquitous in airport security and other environments.

“Edmonton is a laboratory for this tool,” Oriola said. “It may well turn out to be an improvement, but we do not know that for sure.”

Oriola said the police service has had a sometimes “frosty” relationship with its Indigenous and Black residents, particularly after the fatal police shooting of a member of the South Sudanese community last year, and it remains to be seen whether facial recognition technology makes policing safer or improves interactions with the public.

Axon has faced blowback for its technology deployments in the past, as in 2022, when Friedman and seven other members of Axon’s AI ethics board resigned in protest over concerns about a Taser-equipped drone.

In the years since Axon opted against facial recognition, Smith, the CEO, says the company has “continued controlled, lab-based research” of a technology that has “become significantly more accurate” and is now ready for trial in the real world.

But Axon acknowledged in a statement to the AP that all facial recognition systems are affected by “factors like distance, lighting and angle, which can disproportionately impact accuracy for darker-skinned individuals.”

Every match requires human review, Axon said, and part of its testing is also “learning what training and oversight human reviewers must have to mitigate known risks.”

Friedman said Axon should disclose those evaluations. He’d want to see more evidence that facial recognition has improved since his board concluded that it wasn’t reliable enough to ethically justify its use in police cameras.

Friedman said he’s also concerned about police agencies greenlighting the technology’s use without deliberation by local legislators and rigorous scientific testing.

“It’s not a decision to be made simply by police agencies and certainly not by vendors,” he said. “A pilot is a great idea. But there’s supposed to be transparency, accountability. … None of that’s here. They’re just going ahead. They found an agency willing to go ahead and they’re just going ahead.”

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AP writer Kelvin Chan in London contributed to this report.

SAN FRANCISCO — A senior member of the athletics staff at a community college in Oakland was shot on campus Thursday, the second time in two days the city has had a shooting at a local school.

The Oakland Police Department said it is investigating the shooting that occurred just before noon at Laney College, where officers arrived to find a man with gunshot wounds. The victim was taken to a hospital and his condition is unknown.

Mark Johnson, spokesperson for the Peralta Community College District, said in an email that a senior member of Laney’s athletics staff was shot on campus in its field house.

“The individual was immediately transported to a local hospital, and we are keeping them—and their loved ones—in our hearts during this incredibly difficult time,” Johnson said. “Out of respect for their privacy, we are not releasing their name at this moment.”

Authorities didn’t immediately provide more details about the shooting.

John Beam, the school’s athletics director and longtime football coach, and the Laney Eagles were featured in the 2020 season of the Netflix documentary series “Last Chance U.” The docuseries focused on athletes at junior colleges looking to turn their lives around.

Thursday’s incident came a day after a student was shot at Oakland’s Skyline High School. The student is in stable condition. Police say they arrested two juveniles and recovered two firearms.

Oakland Mayor Barbara Lee said she was “heartbroken” by “the second shooting on an Oakland campus in one week.”

Years ago, pre-Inlandia, I read a poem by Jo Scott-Coe about a cave of books that was perpetually on the brink of collapse, encroaching on the speaker of the poem like the giant trash compactor in Star Wars.

Needless to say, that poem spoke to me. There but for the grace of a sturdy bookcase go I.

If you are reading this column, I assume you like books too, so you will be happy to learn that the inaugural Riverside Book Festival is coming Oct. 11 — in just about one week — at Riverside Main Library, downtown.

Bringing a book festival to Riverside has long been a dream and is a natural addition to all of the festivals Riverside, City of Arts and Innovation, annually hosts. Who’s going to be there? The California State Poet Laureate Lee Herrick, for starters. I had the pleasure of meeting him earlier this year when I was in Sacramento for the state Poetry Out Loud finals. When I invited him to be our keynote speaker he was delighted. As an adoptee from Korea, his story is one of love and resilience. He was just appointed for a second term and is the first Asian American to ever hold that post.

We will also be hosting a trio of authors whose names will be familiar to most readers of this column: Alex Espinoza (“The Sons of El Rey”), Tod Goldberg (“The Low Desert”), and Susan Straight (“Mecca”), on writing the Inland Empire. Alex is the Tomás Rivera Endowed Chair of Creative Writing at UC Riverside, Tod is the founder of UCR’s low residency MFA program at the Palm Desert campus, and Susan, a distinguished professor of creative writing at UCR, is a local treasure who lives just blocks from where she was born.

If you have kids, or are curious about writing and illustrating books for young people, bring your curiosity and questions and hear Isabel Quintero (“My Papi Has a Motorcycle”), a writer born and raised in the Inland Empire, alongside another acclaimed local author of books for young people, Nydia Armendia-Sanchez (“Frida Kahlo’s Flower Crown”), and her award-winning illustrator, Loris Lora.

Are you a fan of true stories? Memoir brings those true stories to life and lets you inhabit another person’s experiences for the duration of the book. We will have three acclaimed Southern California memoirists talking about truth in memoir, Samantha Dunn (“Not By Accident”), Casandra Lane (“We Are Bridges”) and JD Mathes (“Ahead of the Flaming Front”).

Are you curious to learn how a novel is born? Former senior correspondent for People Magazine and People in Español, Ron Arias (“The Road to Tamazunchale”), will speak with Carlos Cortés (“Scouts’ Honor”), Riverside’s own expert in multiculturalism and consultant for “Dora the Explorer” and “Go, Diego Go!,” about writing novels well into their fourth quarter of life.

The Riverside Women Creating Change will also be taking the stage, with project leads Deborah Wong and Nicolette Rohr talking with interviewees Rose Mayes, Elizabeth Ayala, Connie Confer, and Penny Newman about community organizing from the ground up.

The indigenous-owned book store Quiet Quail Books will be there, as will Get Lit Books & Things, a bookstore that celebrates underrepresented voices, all in the New Books Discovery Zone where you’ll also find the local authors’ stage; Children’s Pavilion will host activities for families throughout the day; Writers support organizations will be there, including Diamond Valley Writers Guild, Inland Empire California Writers Club, and Temecula Valley Writers and Illustrators, plus food trucks, and Desert Catopia a cat rescue organization because books + cats = heaven. Also, a VIP experience. And the first 200 people to the Festival will receive a free commemorative tote bag.

In many ways, the Riverside Book Festival is my parting gift to Inlandia. As many of you may have read, I will be stepping away from my post as executive director of Inlandia at the end of this year. I have loved every minute of my work, but it’s time for me to make space for someone new.

HARRISBURG, Pa. — Commuters and students in Philadelphia woke up earlier than usual on Monday to navigate service reductions that the region’s public transit agency has called more drastic than any undertaken by a major transit agency in the United States.

The cuts took effect as the school year began in the nation’s sixth-most populous city and could herald similar moves by major transit agencies around the U.S. as they struggle with rising costs and lagging ridership. Reductions are also on the table at transit agencies in Dallas, Chicago, San Francisco and Pittsburgh.

In many places, funding has not kept up with inflation while ridership is still below pre-pandemic levels after many people had their routines disrupted by COVID-19.

Some 52,000 public school students in Philadelphia use public transit to get to school. Students and commuters talked of needing to get up much earlier to make time for longer commutes, unusually crowded buses and skipped stops.

Zairean Wills, a sophomore at Roxborough High School, told The Philadelphia Inquirer that she woke up at 6 a.m., an hour earlier than usual because of the Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority cuts.

“It’s fine because I get more time with my friends, but it sucks that I have to wake up earlier for no reason,” Wills said while waiting in a line of kids at Wissahickon Transportation Center.

She said she will probably need her dad to take her to school in the winter to avoid weather delays making her late to school.

The school district has said it will not punish students who are late because of SEPTA route changes if they have a note from a parent or guardian.

Alayah Brown told the Inquirer that she walked to the 69th Street Transportation Center because most of the buses in her neighborhood were eliminated. She was commuting on her first day of work as a teaching assistant at an elementary school in neighboring Delaware County, but she watched her bus leave the transportation center while she was waiting at a red light to cross the street.

“I’m very mad,” Brown said. “I just paid $50 for an Uber and I’ll still be almost late.”

All told, SEPTA has warned that it will cut half its services by Jan. 1 and won’t provide enhanced service for major tourist events next year. Those include FIFA World Cup matches in Philadelphia, events surrounding the celebration of the nation’s 250th birthday, Major League Baseball’s All-Star Game, the PGA Championship and NCAA March Madness games.

SEPTA has said its cuts this week amount to a 20% across-the-board service reduction to deal with a deficit of more than $200 million. That includes eliminating bus routes with lower ridership and reducing the frequency of bus, trolley and rail services across the region.

It plans to raise fares by 21.5% on Sept. 1 for the system’s approximately 800,000 daily riders. A weekday ride would rise from $2.50 to $2.90 on a bus, train or trolley, it said.

The agency plans to impose a hiring freeze and then, on Jan. 1, carry out additional service cuts that would mean it will have eliminated half its current services. That would include cutting more regional rail and bus routes and imposing a 9 p.m. curfew on rail services, some of which now run as late as 1:30 a.m.

The Chicago Transit Authority is considering shutting down four of eight elevated train lines and 74 of 127 bus routes under the worst-case scenario as it figures out how to plug a $770 million budget hole.

Pittsburgh Regional Transit is considering a 35% service reduction to help close what it calls a roughly $100 million deficit this year. That could include eliminating 45 bus routes, reducing 54 others and eliminating one of three light rail lines.

The San Francisco-area Bay Area Rapid Transit said it will raise fares Jan. 1 and is using hundreds of millions of dollars in emergency state aid to avoid service cuts.

However, it projects that it will face ongoing deficits ranging from $350 million to $400 million in ensuing years that it said could mean “dire and widespread impacts on the Bay Area’s greater transportation network.”

Dallas Area Rapid Transit is considering what cuts to make as it looks to refund nearly $43 million in revenue to other cities.

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Follow Marc Levy on X at: https://x.com/timelywriter

NEW YORK — Three people were wounded during a shooting at New York City’s iconic Times Square, the New York Police Department said Saturday.

One person was held in custody and being questioned over the shooting, the police said. No charges have been pressed yet.

Video on social media showed people running away from the scene, police surrounding a vehicle and attending to the wounded lying on the ground. Several have been hospitalized, but their injuries are not life-threatening, the police said.

The shooting took place at 1:20 a.m. No details have been released so far on how it unfolded.

New York City has seen a remarkable drop in gun violence this year. Through Aug. 3, it has seen its fewest shootings in decades, down 23% so far since last year.

By some measures, New York City’s traffic is more congested than it’s ever been. Enter: Congestion pricing. Since last Sunday, during most hours, cars crossing into the lower half of Manhattan are charged nine dollars. There’s a higher toll for trucks. 

Fourteen hundred cameras keep tabs on the roughly 150,000 commuters entering the zone by car.

“If we can just impact on a proportion of those people, we can make a difference and make it a much better place for everybody,” said Janno Lieber, who heads the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which runs New York’s sprawling subway, bus and commuter rail systems. “We’re wasting a ton of money, literally billions of dollars, according to our business leaders, having people stuck in traffic.” 

The haul from congestion pricing will go largely to the MTA, to improve mass transit. According to Lieber, it will raise between $500 and $800 million a year.

The pricing idea began in 1952, and gained traction in the early 2000s. But there’ve been a lot of bumps in the road. There were lawsuits and protests, for and against.

New Jersey drivers were none too happy; they already pay more than $15 in bridge and tunnel tolls to get into the city.

Singapore began congestion pricing in 1975, and Stockholm in 2006. But New York based its plan on London’s, which rolled out in 2003.

Opponents in New York say this is just a cash grab – another tax that will hurt mainly working people.

John McDonagh has driven a cab for more than 40 years. He’s also a playwright and radio host, and is not a fan of the plan. “It will not reduce congestion here,” McDonagh said. “The street designs of New York now, we have a bus lane on one side, we got a bike lane on the other, concrete barriers. So, 10 cars gives you congestion.”

But with the money going to improve public transport, that will help everybody, right?

McDonagh replied, “Oh, it does? We had a woman that was burned on the subway. We had people being pushed onto the tracks. There’s robberies. And if you take the subway in New York, jumping the turnstile now is an Olympic sport.”

It’s called turnstile jumping – or more politely, “fare evasion” – and the MTA projects it will lose $800 million a year because of it, around the same figure congestion pricing may bring in.

And then there is fare evasion on buses. According to the MTA, 47 percent of riders aren’t paying.

“The MTA has now installed cameras so that they can catch people,” said Kathy Wylde, president of the Partnership for New York City, which mobilizes business leaders to help the city thrive. “They are providing police, even the National Guard is in our system to make sure the people pay their fare.”

Wylde is a longtime advocate for congestion pricing, and has advice for other American cities: “You have to explain the benefits clearly,” she said. “You have to have transit options in most cases. Otherwise, it’s just another tax, because if somebody has no choice, they’re gonna resist.

“The lesson from London [is], they put in 200 new bus routes before they turned on congestion pricing,” Wylde said. “And that was how they got the public to accept it. They had a choice.”

It’s hard to tell how it’s working in New York City after a week, but according to Wylde, “We’re very excited that, in just a few days of congestion pricing, we’re seeing a significant reduction in traffic already.”

Yet, the battle may not be over in New York. Among its opponents: once and future president Donald Trump. Wylde isn’t worried, though. “President Trump has property in New York,” she said. “He, I’m sure, has been stuck in traffic more than a few times here. And I think having New York be a more productive city, I think he’ll appreciate it.”

      
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Story produced by Jay Kernis. Editor: Carol Ross.