a425couple
2019-11-09 18:34:58 UTC
fron
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2019/11/stealing-amazon-packages-age-nextdoor/598156/
complexities of race and class relations in a liberal, gentrifying city
This article is part of our project “The Presence of Justice,”
The Porch Pirate of Potrero Hill Can’t Believe It Came to This
When a longtime resident started stealing her neighbors’ Amazon
packages, she entered a vortex of smart cameras, Nextdoor rants, and
cellphone surveillance.
LAUREN SMILEY NOV 1, 2019 THE PRESENCE OF JUSTICEANIMATION AND
ILLUSTRATIONS BY ELIANA RODGERS
The first time Ganave Fairley got busted for stealing a neighbor’s
Amazon package, she was just another porch thief unlucky to be caught on
tape. In August 2016, a 30-something product marketing manager at
Google, expecting some deliveries, got an iPhone ping from his porch
surveillance camera as it recorded a black woman in a neon hoodie
plucking some bundles off his San Francisco stoop. After arriving home
that afternoon, the Googler got in his Subaru Impreza to hunt for any
remnants strewn around the streets of his Potrero Hill neighborhood.
Instead, he spotted Fairley herself, boarding a city bus, which he
trailed while dialing 911. Minutes later, he watched responding police
officers pull their cruiser in front of the bus and escort her off. The
Googler, sitting nearby in his car, played the Nest Cam tape for
them—Yep, it’s her—and the police pulled a $107.66 Apple Magic Keyboard
from Fairley’s purse and black tar heroin from her coin pocket. The
officers wrote Fairley a ticket with a court date a month later. “I
thought it was just a ticket, and that was it,” Fairley said.
It was only about nine months later, in May 2017, when one of Fairley’s
neighbors plastered photos of her, “Wanted”-style, on Nextdoor, that
Fairley realized things were about to get worse. Nextdoor is an online
ticker tape of homeowner and tenant concerns, and the grievances can be
particularly telling in a city of Dickensian extremes like San
Francisco, whose influx of tech wealth is pitting suburban expectations
against urban realities. The city’s property-crime rate is among the
highest in the United States. Nextdoor posts about dogs slurping from a
public drinking fountain and Whole Foods overcharging again (“Be on
guard”) show up alongside reports of smash-and-grab car break-ins,
slashed tires, and an entire crime subgenre of “porch pirates,” the
Artful Dodgers of the Amazon age.
Fairley and her neighbor do not agree—will likely never agree—on what
happened in the minutes prior to the photos of Fairley going up on
Nextdoor. Fairley has sworn that the boxes she picked up were from down
the street, where they had been laid out for the taking, and that her
6-year-old daughter was helping to haul them to their home in the public
housing down the block.
Julie Margett, a nurse who lives on the street, in a purple cottage with
a rainbow gay-pride flag and a black lives matter sign in the window,
said she was leaving her garage and spotted Fairley coming down her
neighbor’s stairs carrying boxes with various addresses on them.
Surmising that they were stolen, she asked Fairley warily, in her
British accent, “What are you doing?”
Fairley called her a racist (in fact, she still does) and told her she
was in the middle of moving. “That was what was so disarming about her,”
Margett told me. “Before you know it, she’s torn you to shreds and she’s
off down the block.” Margett snapped photos of the mother-daughter haul
act—in one, the young girl sticks her tongue out at the camera—and,
after calling the police, uploaded them into a Nextdoor post: “Package
thieves.”
So, Fairley told me two years later, sitting in an orange sweatsuit in a
county-jail interview room, that was the real acceleration of the epic
feud of Fairley v. Neighbors of Potrero Hill, a vortex of smart-cam
clips, Nextdoor rants, and cellphone surveillance that would tug at the
complexities of race and class relations in a liberal, gentrifying city.
The clash would also expose a fraught debate about who is responsible,
and who is to blame, for the city’s increasingly unlivable conditions.
As Fairley says, “It just got bigger and bigger and bigger.”
Parts of potrero hill feel like the sort of charmed place where Amazon
deliveries could sit undisturbed on your stoop. The hill’s western
ridge, overlooking the city, is filled with cozy bungalows and Victorian
houses that once were affordable for San Francisco’s working and
artistic classes but have appreciated during the tech rush; now most of
them sell for well over $1 million. The public hospital where Fairley
was born is now named after Mark Zuckerberg.
Meanwhile, the hill’s eastern and southern flanks are still lined with
decrepit 1940s-era bunkers of public housing between patches of scruffy
grass and concrete patios. The unhoused have set up camp around the
neighborhood too, the city’s homeless population having spiked 30
percent in the past two years. This sometimes has led to hostile and
politically divisive clashes, like when a luxury auction house at the
foot of Potrero turned its sprinklers on the tents clustered outdoors in
2016. (The auction house claimed that the sprinklers were meant to clean
the building and sidewalks, and were “not intended to disrespect the
homeless.”)
Read: Who’s really buying property in San Francisco?
Still, some residents, like Margett, said they were attracted to the
diversity in a city that is hemorrhaging people who don’t earn tech
paychecks. Margett said Potrero welcomed her, a white woman and a proud
lesbian sporting a Mohawk ponytail (“The pulse of the neighborhood, to
me, is more important than petty crime”), and the neighbors have dealt
with the glaring disparities in their own ways. Every week, Margett
picks up donations from big-box stores to take to homeless shelters; she
also puts them on the bench in front of her house, free for the taking.
A union-leader neighbor, Jason Rosenbury, showed the person he suspected
of stealing his succulent plants a Nest recording of the heist, and said
he wouldn’t report it to the police if he got the plants back. Upon
their return, he glued new pots to the concrete to avoid further strife.
“I’m a full-blown socialist,” he told me, “but I’m also for law and order.”
When I visited Margett, she said that in her interaction with Fairley,
the charged dynamic of “white-privileged homeowner” versus “someone who
is barely making it” was not lost on her, yet she didn’t consider
herself a bigot for calling out what she deduced was petty crime. “One
is always so concerned about not wanting to appear that way, and then
I’m second-guessing myself—Maybe I did leap to that conclusion because
she’s African American,” she recalled. “But no! I know what I saw.”
On view out of Margett’s rear window, a redevelopment plan for Potrero’s
public housing was under way. The run-down buildings are being razed,
and the dwellers are being moved into fancy new buildings next to
neighbors paying market rates, an upgrade that Fairley, who had at one
point moved to a new unit when her old one became infested with mold,
had been looking forward to.
Fairley is now 38, with close-cropped hair styled in braids. Among the
family members’ names tattooed on her neck, back, and arm are those of
her parents, next to praying hands; Fairley said she has forgiven them
for her chaotic early years in Potrero, when they were addicted to drugs
and she witnessed abuse. (She told me she prefers not to talk about the
painful particulars.) When Fairley was 5 years old, social workers
whisked her and her siblings to a great-aunt’s, where she told me she
had a sheltered childhood: therapy, church, road trips to Yosemite. In
middle school, she started flourishing at basketball and earned a
scholarship to a Catholic high school. But a knee injury shut down the
tuition aid, she said, and a transfer to public school introduced her to
a rough crowd. At 19, Fairley came out as gay and, more shocking to both
her and her family, pregnant.
Doctors started her on painkillers after complications giving birth to
her son, and Fairley liked how “sociable” she felt when taking them.
Since the pills were pricey, she turned to heroin and, later, meth.
She’d been in legal trouble as a young teen—for swiping more than $400
from Walmart, a misdemeanor, while cashiering—but the drug use
compounded her problems. Her older sister, Kai, told me that when
Fairley was clean, she was “brighter, more alive.” In 2006, Fairley was
convicted of a felony, for stealing more than $400 worth of gift cards
while working at Macy’s. For a while, she and her son stayed at a
girlfriend’s place and then a homeless shelter. In 2009, they landed a
unit back in Potrero’s public housing, but the stability didn’t solve
her problems. After her daughter’s birth, in 2010, Child Protective
Services took both of her children because of her alleged drug use.
Within a year, after she got clean and started trekking daily to a
methadone clinic, she got her kids back.
Her son was arrested as a teen and went to live in a group home, Fairley
said, but she dreamed of her daughter having a “normal” life—with “no
kind of abuse whatsoever,” she said. Fairley kept her home from
sleepovers and escorted her to the park and corner store. When her
daughter started kindergarten, in 2016, her teacher, Chloe Dietkus,
noted that the girl was always dressed sharply and, with her silly
bravado, easily made friends. “At the end of the day she’d always run
over to her mom,” Dietkus said, and they’d walk home, “seeming happy.”
Yet around that time, Fairley relapsed on drugs, and the deliveries that
were dropped daily on her neighbors’ porches caught her attention. At
that point, she didn’t know about the cameras or Nextdoor. In the months
that followed, the police would find a cache of the neighbors’
belongings and mail in her possession. Her sister told me that Fairley
generally sold the packages “for a little bit of nothing, just to get
high,” or ate any deliveries that contained food. (Police say thieves
generally sell their pickings on eBay, Craigslist, or to middlemen, who
may hawk them at flea markets.) Fairley insisted to me that she stole
only a small number of items—“I did it maybe once or twice, three times
at the most; it wasn’t like a new job I went into”—and that she sold
just one of them, a set of storage bins, for about $20. (She also told
me she stole mostly in order to buy necessities, not drugs.) She thought
the packages would be replaced by Amazon and other senders, so her gain
wouldn’t be her neighbors’ loss. “That’s what eased my conscience taking
someone’s property, because I’m not a bad person, it was just a bad
choice,” she told me. “I was in a desperate state.”
As Fairley started hitting the stoops, her neighbors took to Nextdoor to
discuss what to do. One group thought it was naive to expect a package
to sit undisturbed for hours on a city stoop. Another camp felt the
residents deserved the same rights to deliveries as in any other town. A
third group was the solutions crowd: They advised having the boxes
delivered to workplaces, or to Amazon Hub Locker, or with Amazon Key, a
smart-lock system that allows couriers to drop packages directly inside
a home or car. It turns out that while delivering packages is big
business, so is thwarting their theft.
Perhaps a bigger threat to Amazon than the cost of replacing stolen
goods is any hitch in its famously seamless service. In February 2018,
Amazon acquired Ring, the smart doorbell and camera company. The
official reason was to buoy neighborhood and home security, though much
of that crime would be people swiping Amazon packages. (Nest, one of
Ring’s main competitors, is owned by Google.)
Currently, 17 percent of American homeowners have a smart video
surveillance device, and unit sales are expected to double by 2023.
(Fairley was caught on Nest and another cam called Kuna, and several
neighbors filmed her on their phones.) The popularity of these devices
has led to the “porch pirate gotcha” film genre, a sort of America’s
Funniest Home Videos of petty crime. In 2018, a 30-something white woman
named Kelli Russell became viral international news for stealing boxes
from 21 Dallas neighbors while looking like she was on her way to yoga
class. “She’s blond and a former model, and it makes it explode,” her
attorney Tim Menchu told me.
(Yo! here you go!
These videos, whether they go viral or not, often appear first on
Facebook or Nextdoor. Nextdoor, a private company in San Francisco, was
recently valued at $2.1 billion when it raised funds from top Silicon
Valley investors. It relies on advertising for its revenue and has
capitalized on its neighborhood-watch vibe by selling ads to
home-security companies, including Ring (along with others such as ADT
and SimpliSafe)—though Nextdoor CEO Sarah Friar told me home security
doesn’t make up a huge proportion of their advertiser base, and only 5
percent of the site’s posts are in the crime and safety category. After
press about rampant racial profiling on the platform in 2015, the
company redesigned its app to prompt users who mention race to also
include descriptors like hair, clothing, and shoes, which the company
claimed reduced racial profiling by 75 percent.
Read: What Nextdoor posts reveal about America
Even so, Sierra Villaran, a San Francisco deputy public defender who
handled Fairley’s case early on, has seen how social media’s
rabble-rousing still leads to profiling of minorities and the poor. One
of her clients, a Latino man, was arrested after a resident mistook him
for someone recorded by their Ring device. (He was later released.) Not
only does an arrest go on an innocent person’s record and potentially
subject her to the use of force, Villaran said, it makes the accused
feel like the cops will take the word of accusers, who are usually
wealthier, over their own. Neighborhood surveillance and social media
aren’t “adding quality to their life, making them any more safe.”
Back in Potrero Hill, a man mistook Fairley’s sister for Fairley
herself, following her down the block and berating her as she passed out
fliers. “He didn’t believe me,” said Kai, who was working for a
community group at the time. “I was embarrassed, mostly.” She put her
hand up in front of her face as he tried to take a photo of her. Friar,
Nextdoor’s CEO, said that difficulty identifying people correctly is a
human problem, not one Nextdoor invented, but the company has formed an
anti-racial-profiling task force and continues to update the platform to
encourage users to “get out of your bird brain—that immediate
response—and into your cognitive brain, to pause and ultimately make a
better decision.”
The proliferation of porch cameras surely contributes to the
surveillance culture on Nextdoor and other social apps. Amazon’s Ring
division has been particularly aggressive in marketing its products,
including through city officials. Under the reasoning that more
surveillance improves public safety, over 500 police
departments—including in Houston and a stretch of Los Angeles
suburbs—have partnered with Ring. Many departments advertise rebates for
Ring devices on government social-media channels, sometimes offering up
to $125. Ring matches the rebate up to $50.
Dave Maass, a senior investigative researcher at the Electronic Frontier
Foundation, a nonprofit focused on digital civil liberties, said it’s
unseemly to use taxpayer money to subsidize the build-out of citizen
surveillance. Amazon and other moneyed tech companies competing for
market share are “enlisting law enforcement to be their sales force, to
have the cops give it their imprimatur of credibility,” said Maass, a
claim echoed in an open letter to government agencies from more than 30
civil-rights organizations this fall and a petition asking Congress to
investigate the Ring partnerships. (Ring disputes this characterization.)
Read: Amazon Ring will survive the anti-surveillance backlash
Ring maintains that offering the discount makes the device more
affordable, but Maass countered that, even with tax-subsidized rebates,
“things like doorbell cameras are not a purchase someone would make if
they already have trouble putting food on the table.” The cheapest
doorbell costs $99, before rebates; the ability to store or review
footage after the fact runs another $30 to $100 a year. “Does that mean
that police are protecting the property of affluent communities more
than the property of poor communities?” Maas asked.
In some cities, the relationship between the police and companies has
gone beyond marketing. Amazon is helping police departments run “bait
box” operations, in which police place decoy boxes on porches—often with
GPS trackers inside—to capture anyone who tries to steal them. Gearing
up for one such operation in December 2018, police in Jersey City, New
Jersey, exchanged emails, which I obtained through a public-records
request, with loss-prevention employees from Amazon and a
public-relations staffer from its Ring division. Amazon sent police free
branded boxes, and even heat maps of areas where the company’s customers
suffer the most thefts. Ring donated doorbells that police officers
installed on their own stoops to film thieves, and offered to coordinate
a PR campaign. At one point, the police department asked Ring if it
could extend a discount on Ring devices to all police staff, and Ring
obliged, offering $50 off.
After receiving news about the Jersey City sting’s early success—seven
arrests in three days during a soft launch, and a segment on Good
Morning America—Amazon’s Rob Gibson, then a senior program manager for
loss prevention, wrote in a December 13 email to the department, “Insane
how it took off! How many arrests now? You can bet on it that I am
coming out at some point to buy you a beer. You have helped me more than
you know here internally. I need a patch and any swag you have so I can
rep the PD here in Seattle.”
During the sting, Ring introduced the Jersey City police to another
program it offers: Police departments can join a Ring app called
Neighbors, on which residents (mostly Ring owners) broadcast their
footage to people nearby. If police want to solicit a user’s footage for
an active investigation, Ring will send the user an email with the
police request; if the user volunteers to cooperate, the footage is sent
back to the police, along with the user’s name, address, and email. As
part of the pitch to join, Ring offered the Jersey City Police
Department a free Ring device for every 20 residents who downloaded the app.
Meanwhile, Nextdoor allows police departments to join the app to post
neighborhood-level news and polls. For its part, Nest doesn’t actively
partner with police, but it does answer subpoenas: It received more than
100 requests from governments and courts last year, and provided user
data in about 25 percent of the cases. The tech also encourages people
to act like police: Captain Una Bailey of the San Francisco Police
Department told me about a case in which a resident had a picture of a
burglar from a Nest Cam, and digitally tracked a stolen laptop to a
homeless person’s tent—then called the police to make an arrest. “They
had taken all these steps that basically hand us an arrest on a silver
platter with all the evidence,” said Bailey. “I’m definitely an advocate
of people installing cameras.” (San Francisco’s police department hasn’t
participated in surveillance-device subsidies, the Neighbors app, or
bait-box operations, but has joined Nextdoor.)
Read: The police officer ‘Nextdoor’
Stings and porch-pirate footage attract media attention—but what comes
next for the thieves rarely gets the same limelight. Often, perpetrators
face punishments whose scale might surprise the amateur smart-cam
detectives and Nextdoor sleuths who help nail them. In Jersey City, the
bait-box operation netted 16 arrests in 10 days. Offenders may be routed
to drug treatment and housing, according to police emails to Amazon;
those with previous convictions could be eligible for jail time.
In December, the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Arkansas
announced an enforcement campaign called Operation Porch Pirate. Two
suspects were arrested and charged with federal mail theft. One pleaded
guilty to stealing $170.42 worth of goods, including camouflage crew
socks and a Call of Duty video game from Amazon, and was sentenced to 14
months of probation. Another pleaded guilty to possession of stolen
mail—four packages, two from Amazon—and awaits sentencing of up to five
years in prison and a $250,000 fine. Russell, the blond woman in Dallas,
ended up on two years of probation. The California legislature is
considering a bill that would elevate porch piracy to a burglary charge;
it would be a misdemeanor or a felony based, in part, on the suspect’s
criminal history.
While porch cams have been used to investigate cases as serious as
homicides, the surveillance and neighborhood social networking typically
make a particular type of crime especially visible: those lower-level
ones happening out in public, committed by the poorest. Despite the much
higher cost of white-collar crime, it seems to cause less societal
hand-wringing than what might be caught on a Ring camera, said W. David
Ball, a professor at Santa Clara University School of Law. “Did people
really feel that crime was ‘out of control’ after Theranos?” he said.
“People lost hundreds of millions of dollars. You would have to break
into every single car in San Francisco for the next ten years to amount
to the amount stolen under Theranos.”
That perspective was little comfort to San Franciscans in late 2017,
when the city was the nation’s leader in property crime. In Potrero,
Fairley had been captured on camera enough times, snatching packages or
walking down the street with bundles of mail, that many in the
neighborhood had a face and a name to attach to their generalized anger
about ongoing nuisances. Fairley was correct in thinking that, in many
cases, Amazon will replace pilfered packages. Her major miscalculation
was in thinking that her neighbors would, therefore, just shrug and move on.
In december 2017, Mark Arnold, the senior vice president of marketing
for a radiosurgery start-up, was working from home when he glanced out
at his stoop and snapped into high alert: Ganave goddamn Fairley! He cut
off a conference call without explanation and sprinted outside in his
socks, cuing up his cellphone camera. Arnold had been keeping an eye out
for Fairley all fall, since $691 of Walgreens, Target, and Burlington
Stores charges showed up on a Chase card that had been mailed to him and
that police had plucked out of Fairley’s backpack.
As he starts filming, Arnold confronts Fairley in a neighbor’s
stairwell, holding some sort of paper. “So what’s going on?” Arnold
asks, authoritatively. “We’ve got plenty of photos and videos of you
stealing things up and down this street.”
“You don’t have me stealing nothing,” Fairley snipes back. He asks if
her name is Ganave. She says it’s Jessica. “I pass out flyers every day
over here,” she insists—from Nextel (which closed years earlier)—and
adds, “Just because I’m African American don’t mean I can’t pass out
flyers!”
“This has zero to do with race,” Arnold interjects. Fairley shoots back
that it does. (Arnold is white.) Then she threatens him with a
harassment suit, and he says he’ll be forwarding the tape to the
district attorney. Fairley tells him that, when he does, he should
include a note of clarification: “I didn’t see her doing nothing, but
I’m assuming.”
After the spat, Arnold followed Fairley down the street, watching her
take other mail—“fearless,” as Arnold would later describe her to me—and
called the cops. He snapped a photo of Fairley for a forthcoming
Nextdoor report as the police came and detained her. Neighbors thanked
and high-fived him as he walked home, in socks, victorious—at least for
the hour.
Arnold is a fit 51-year-old dad, with an aggressive likeability
befitting his marketing job. He bought the flat he’d been living in a
decade ago, when Potrero home values were half what they are today. (“I
don’t consider myself wealthy by any stretch,” he said—which, in a city
that reportedly has the world’s highest density of billionaires, isn’t
entirely unreasonable.) At the time, he and Fairley lived within two
blocks of each other, and both fell into a zone where students score
poorly on tests and are given special priority in the school lottery.
Fairley doesn’t drive, and she sent her daughter to the school they
could walk to. Arnold sent his child to a higher-performing one farther
away. Arnold didn’t know many of his neighbors, but he had been bonding
with their online avatars on Nextdoor about their shared headache.
Arnold began combining the neighbors’ Fairley-related posts in a single
document. They started with the first dispatch, from May 2017, with
Margett photographing Fairley and her daughter. In October of that year,
a friend of Arnold’s, then a VP at Flipboard, followed Fairley in his
Prius, watching her go door to door collecting packages—a mail carrier
in reverse. In November, a cam caught a lithe woman who looked like
Fairley crawling up a home’s steps to seize a fat Amazon pouch of lug
nuts, a rosary dangling from her neck. Two weeks later, neighbors were
gardening on a shared strip of land when Fairley passed by balancing a
long lamp box on her shoulder. (Fairley claimed that the box contained
her own headboard and lampshade.) Seeing an address written in big
letters for a home in the opposite direction, one of them grabbed the
box and demanded to see an ID to prove Fairley lived there. A second man
called 911 as a woman videoed Fairley’s ensuing tirade: “That’s why
people get shot. You don’t pull somebody’s package off their fucking
arm,” Fairley snapped, then stalked off.
Two incidents—the Googler and the bus; the Prius calling in
Fairley—resulted in charges (petty theft, mail theft, receiving stolen
property, and possession of heroin—all misdemeanors), and tickets for
court dates. But Fairley regularly skipped her hearings—she’d lose track
of the dates, she later told me, and just had “a lot going on”—which
slowed the process of resolving the cases. Again and again, in her
absence, the judge would issue bench warrants, and Fairley would
eventually be arrested and booked into jail, from which the judge would
release her to await her next hearing, with demands that she report to
diversion programs or Narcotics Anonymous meetings—all while neighbors
continued to report on Nextdoor that they were watching her steal mail.
San Francisco County courts have long referred many low-level offenders
to rehabilitative programs while they are awaiting trial rather than
have them sit in jail. This practice endlessly angers the victims of the
property crimes, and concerns cops, too. “Our big request is for
consequences,” said Commander Raj Vaswani, who headed the district
responsible for Potrero at the time, adding that police typically only
pursue an arrest if a person or a camera directly witnesses the package
being stolen.
Yet locking up low-level criminals won’t solve what Ball, the Santa
Clara University law professor, believes is the root cause of these
crimes: poverty within astronomically expensive cities. “Everyone
assumes that jail works to deter people. But I don’t know if I were
hungry, and had no other way of eating, that that would deter me from
stealing,” he said.
Arnold thought the whole cycle looked like institutional apathy. Three
times, he walked up to the window at Vaswani’s station in the Bayview,
the southeastern-most district of San Francisco, which is among the
poorest, with high violent crime rates. The officers seemed underwhelmed
by his package gripes, saying that petty theft is a cite-and-release
sort of misdemeanor and asking, “What do you want us to do?” Arnold
would respond, “Prosecute her,” referring to Fairley. They said that was
the district attorney’s job.
Read: Why can’t San Francisco stop its epidemic of window smashing?
Vaswani acknowledged that his station was responding to two different
sets of resident concerns: “Violent crime might be targeted, and doesn’t
affect the average person walking their dog every morning.” He defended
his station’s response to the package theft, saying he dispatched a
bicycle officer to cut down on that kind of quality-of-life crime, which
isn’t seen as serious “but, to the average person that lives there and
pays really high rent, or has bought a really expensive house in a
really nice neighborhood such as Potrero Hill, … affects their daily lives.”
In January 2018, Arnold took time off from work to attend one of
Fairley’s hearings, at the suggestion of the prosecutor then handling
the case. (An organized group of San Franciscans also has taken to
sitting in on burglary cases to show elected judges that voters are
watching.) While Arnold sat in the courtroom, his wife texted that
Fairley wouldn’t be showing up: She was on their stoop that very moment,
apparently in the middle of another stealing expedition. (Fairley was
not charged in this alleged incident, and her lawyer declined to comment.)
Margett had retaliated against Fairley by placing her Boston terrier’s
poop in a decoy box on her stoop. (Someone picked it up; Margett doesn’t
know who.) Arnold watched a vigilante method online: having a blank
shotgun shell go off when someone lifts a decoy box. He feared that the
startled thief could fall down his stairs and sue him, and concluded
that it wouldn’t “end well.” He headed back to Nextdoor, reporting that
going to court had been a fiasco but that the judge had issued warrants
for Fairley’s arrest. He recommended that neighbors call 911 as soon as
they saw her, and that they “gather watertight evidence for the next trial.”
Word about Fairley had gotten back to her neighbors in public housing—at
least to Uzuri Pease-Greene, who runs a nonprofit community center out
of her building and serves as a safety liaison to the police.
Pease-Greene was one of the few residents of that part of the hill
active on Nextdoor back in 2014, and soon realized that she had stumbled
into “an upper-middle-class Facebook,” on which the house-dwelling folks
blamed people who lived in public housing for every woe. “They stepped
on a banana peel,” she said, “and would be like, ‘The projects put it
there!’”
On Nextdoor, Pease-Greene, a black woman, blasted stereotyping while
making it clear that she didn’t condone any shenanigans, no matter who
the perpetrator was. In a city with staggering racial disparities in its
criminal-justice system—African Americans make up only about 6 percent
of the population but more than half the county jail
inmates—Pease-Greene was privately relieved that the city’s thieves,
including those outed on Nextdoor, were of all races. “It’s sad that I
have to think like that, but it’s like, oh God, thank you!” she said.
“This is everybody doing it.”
Most comments about Fairley weren’t explicitly about her race, which
isn’t to say that they were gracious. Pease-Greene read some of the
men’s threats toward Fairley—which ranged from “Might as well taze her
next time she’s caught. Preferably put her in a coma” to wishes of “an
extremely swift kick in her saggy pants a$$”—and worried that the
writers might not be kidding. “When you get people that are talking like
that, who have white privilege, they’re not going to do any jail time,”
she said. Pease-Greene told an assistant district attorney she knew that
the clash was getting out of control, and she warned Fairley that
footage of her taking packages was all over Nextdoor.
Conor Friedersdorf: The undemocratic spread of Big Brother
While Fairley didn’t stop, and neighbors on Nextdoor vented that no one
cared about their complaints, authorities were, in fact, circling in.
They started exacting collateral with a much higher price than anything
Fairley took.
Fairley’s troubles started ramping up one night in November 2017, when
police spotted her in the Potrero projects and arrested her on bench
warrants. They added a child endangerment charge when the officers
dispatched to Fairley’s unit found that her daughter had wandered
outside, alone and upset. (The charge was later dropped.) Fairley had no
one to call to take her daughter, and the cops contacted Child
Protective Services, which eventually had her stay with a paternal
great-aunt.
Fairley cycled in and out of jail in the following months. She said that
with her daughter gone, she sometimes stopped getting her government
cash assistance, exacerbating the poverty that had initially led her to
steal mail. (She did, at points, still get food stamps.) Fairley said
her immediate need for money made it impossible to launch a job hunt. “I
live now, today. I have to eat tonight.” At one point, Arnold thought he
spotted her stealing produce at Whole Foods; he reported it to a
manager, but Fairley wasn’t charged. When told about this, Fairley’s
defense attorney, Brandon M. Banks, described Arnold as “the ring leader
in the smear campaign” against his client. “It is unfortunate that he
believed every time he saw Ms. Fairley at the grocery store or with a
package in her hand he believed she was stealing it.” Arnold, however,
argued that the evidence of Fairley’s thefts was “irrefutable.” “It’s
not a smear nor an opinion, just an unfortunate reality,” he said. “It’s
very disappointing [that] Banks has chosen to smear the victims.” Kai
told me that when she brought up stealing with her sister, Fairley would
say that “she has to do what she has to do, and someone else is going to
take it if she doesn’t.”
In January 2018, yet another neighbor grabbed a package out of Fairley’s
hand, and signed a citizen’s arrest form, leading to another charge of
petty theft. In February, a judge slammed Fairley with a stay-away order
for blocks where she’d been accused of stealing. In March, the police
and U.S. Postal Service inspectors rustled through Fairley’s unit with a
search warrant, finding clothes and other items she had been seen
wearing in cellphone and porch-cam footage, along with mail and
documents printed with the names of 40 different neighbors. After
missing yet more court dates that spring—resulting in more warrants,
more arrests—she was jailed again in April, and released the next month
with an ankle monitor.
Fairley’s time was up. Her landlord had issued warnings because of the
police visits to her unit, she told me. Fairley said that in June, she
found a “notice to vacate” on her door. Before she could challenge it,
sheriff’s deputies strode into her unit with an arrest warrant—she’d
missed another court date—and found her hiding under a gigantic blue
teddy bear. This time, the judge didn’t let her out of jail, and Fairley
couldn’t pay bail as the prosecutor pursued charges for the three
alleged stealing episodes. Banks stepped in from San Francisco’s
aggressive public defender’s office. Fairley rejected a plea bargain
that Banks considered a “terrible” deal (including a stay-away order
from Fairley’s surrounding neighborhood and, to his thinking, too much
jail time)—and the case of Ganave Fairley v. Neighbors of Potrero Hill
hurtled toward trial.
In august 2018, Fairley plunked herself behind the defense table for a
four-day blur of disputes over Nick’s solar panel battery switch,
Daniel’s Apple keyboard, Alexandra’s HelloFresh groceries, Sorcha’s
Montessori books, Micaela’s and Elizabeth’s checks, Samantha’s dog’s
probiotics, Jennifer’s, Jabari’s, and Brigette’s United credit cards,
and, by God, Dell’s hot sauce—representing a total of 23 misdemeanor
charges of “petty theft,” “receiving stolen property,” and “mail theft,”
plus the drug possession charge for the heroin found in Fairley’s pocket
back in August 2016 when this had all started.
The prosecutor, Jennifer Huber, told jurors that the case was “not a
whodunit: The defendant was caught red-handed stealing, over and over
and over again.” Fifteen neighbors testified, and the prosecutor showed
jurors the evidence they’d collected: The photo of Fairley’s daughter
sticking her tongue out at Julie Margett. The cellphone video of Fairley
sniping “That’s why people get shot” after the gardening neighbor took
the lamp box from her. The spat where she’d called Arnold a racist. None
of these incidents were charged as crimes but were admitted as evidence
of Fairley’s m.o., though Banks, the defense attorney, alleged that the
parade of squabbles was just to sully her character.
As Banks saw it, Fairley had been caught in a web of surveillance,
gentrification, and racism, in which vigilante neighbors targeted her
for anything that went missing, when, in fact, many other porch pirates
were also stealing in Potrero. She might have stolen some items, but not
everything she was being blamed for taking. “This case is about mob
mentality and the lowest-hanging fruit,” Banks declared in his opening
statement. “And the lowest-hanging fruit in this case is Ms. Fairley.”
Joshua Benton: The doorbell company that’s selling fear
He emphasized that she was a longtime resident of Potrero, a
neighborhood whose rising wealth had alienated her from her own
community. (To be fair, while some of the neighbors were relative
newcomers, several victims testified that they’d lived in Potrero for
decades.) Given that Fairley had been caught on tape stealing several
packages, and cops had recovered other items in her possession, some of
Banks’s case seemed to rest heavily on the “guilty beyond a reasonable
doubt” standard, focusing on the fact that several of the victims, such
as the man who had lost his subscription hot sauce, had never seen
Fairley taking the stolen items:
“Well, I guess, when did you first become aware that this hot sauce was
missing?”
“It’s hard to tell. I get them every month. So I don’t know.”
“You don’t know who took the hot sauce?”
“I don’t know who took it. Just, I recognize this”—the sauce found on
Fairley—“is definitely my hot sauce.”
(It was.)
Fairley told me that she was surprised by how angry the neighbors
seemed. In court, she wore a suit Banks had brought her from his
office’s wardrobe, and Arnold noticed that she had filled out in jail.
“She looked groomed, slept, and fed,” Arnold told me later. “It made me
believe she was being properly looked after.” When Arnold took the
stand, Banks tried to get him to admit that he’d badly wanted to get
Fairley arrested. “Do you normally post telling people that they should
call 911 irrespective of whether they see someone commit a crime or not?”
“I do not, normally. This is a very abnormal situation.”
Arnold’s credibility went mostly unscathed. Even so, Banks did succeed
in showing who gets the benefit of the doubt in Potrero. He asked the
gardening man who demanded identification from Fairley in the lamp box
episode whether he would investigate everyone walking down the street
with a package. His answer teetered on profiling: “If they look
suspicious, and it’s not their address” on the delivery. When Banks then
dug in to ask whether he thought Fairley was wearing something
suspicious, the man said, “She just had a hoodie, and she was carrying a
box from the next block down. I’ve never seen her in that block, and I
know a lot of people who live down there, so I assumed it wasn’t her box.”
While wealth and race disparities were obvious in the courtroom, they
weren’t on trial. Nor was the citizen surveillance facilitated by porch
cams and Nextdoor to the benefit of corporations and venture
capitalists. Nor were such lofty systemic issues as the criminalization
of poverty and addiction. The question was simply: Did 12 jurors think
Fairley once had heroin in her possession and had stolen some items?
(Mid-trial, the prosecutor reduced the 24 counts to 16, of drug
possession, theft, and receiving stolen property.)
After a day of deliberations, the jury returned a packet of verdict
sheets on which one of them had scrawled “GUILTY,” determining that
Fairley had committed every act she was charged with. They even
convicted her of stealing when they had been given the alternative of
finding that she merely possessed stolen items.
In sum: She was found guilty of the drug charge, of five counts of
receiving stolen property (one was later thrown out), and of every
single theft.
The case continues to be litigated, both in and out of the courtroom.
Her lawyer filed an appeal, which is ongoing as of this writing, arguing
that each stealing spree should have constituted a single conviction,
rather than each stolen item. And in Potrero, Fairley and the neighbors
weren’t done with each other yet.
Ahead of fairley’s sentencing hearings in August and September, four
neighbors submitted victim statements to detail the toll the crimes had
taken. Read aloud in the courtroom by the prosecutor, Arnold’s topped
them all: He’d written that his home “no longer feels sacred,” adding
that Fairley’s remark about people getting shot made him fear
retribution. He had no choice, he’d written, but to move out of the
city. Fairley thought he was exaggerating, to force her out of the
neighborhood instead.
Judge Charles Crompton acknowledged that economic necessity had
contributed to Fairley’s actions, and sentenced her to a minimum of one
year in a full-time drug rehab program—the first stage of three years of
probation—and imposed a stay-away order from the blocks she’d targeted.
Fairley, having been kicked out of her Potrero unit while in jail and
pushed into the city’s growing ranks of homeless people, was heartened
by the news of the residential program. At least it would be a roof over
her head.
Yet during her first week at the rehab program, in mid-October, Fairley
learned that having taken other people’s stuff meant that she had lost
all of hers; everything in her unit had been thrown out because she
hadn’t been around to claim her possessions. Losing photo albums with
her children’s pictures in them hurt the worst: “No memories, nothing,”
she told me. Since she was no longer a resident of Potrero’s public
housing, she had also lost her chance to move into the incoming
redeveloped complex. Then, within a month of arriving at the rehab
program, she failed three drug tests—meth, she said—and was kicked out.
At the time, her sister, Kai, was squatting in a Potrero public housing
unit, and says Fairley initially stayed with her, telling Kai that she
hadn’t expected to “come home to nothing.” Then Fairley climbed through
a window into her old, now-empty unit in Potrero and began sleeping
there on cushions she had scavenged. She didn’t call her daughter on
Halloween or Christmas; the girl told the great-aunt who’d taken her in
that her mom was “lost.” When Fairley was a no-show for a December 26
probation hearing, the judge once again called for her arrest.
She wasn’t lost for long. Back in Potrero, Julie Margett opened her door
late one night in December to her union-leader neighbor, Jason
Rosenbury, who was bringing her some homemade cooked collard greens. He
told her that someone was sleeping on top of the clothes she had put on
her bench for people to take. The sleeping woman heard him, rustled, and
said to Margett, in a friendly tone, “I know you from court!”
Margett was stunned. “Are you Ganave?” Fairley said she was. With no
apparent rancor toward the woman who’d first put her on Nextdoor,
Fairley told Margett she’d gained a lot of weight in jail and had
stopped stealing. She added that she’d lost everything and had nowhere
to go. Margett told her she couldn’t sleep on the bench, but suggested a
women’s shelter in a nearby neighborhood and gave her a jacket, along
with some sparkling water and chips. Fairley said she’d move to a bench
up the street and ambled off.
On New Year’s Day, a new post entitled “A bold daytime porch thief”
appeared on Potrero’s Nextdoor. A software engineer at Square had posted
a Nest Cam video of a woman jauntily striding up to his entryway and
checking inside a utility box where postal workers leave deliveries, a
package already tucked under her arm. Margett dove into the comments:
“OMG—I think that’s Ganave Fairley?”
Mark Arnold wrote that it was her—noting her inward-jutting left
knee—and urged people to call 911 if they spotted her doing anything
illegal, including stepping foot in the stay-away zone.
Uzuri Pease-Greene, Nextdoor’s unofficial public housing spokeswoman,
had been rooting for Fairley. She saw the new post, too, and thought,
Son of a bitch.
Squatting in her unit and having lost her daughter and her belongings,
Fairley was apparently back to what had gotten her into this mess in the
first place. A month later, in a new Nest video shot at the same
entryway, Fairley was seen mumbling to herself, tripping on a recycling
bin on her way down the sidewalk. (Fairley told me she wasn’t interested
in talking about the videos.) Ten days later, cops found her in her
former unit and hauled her back to jail on warrants.
I visited Fairley in jail several times this past spring while she was
waiting for another rehab program to accept her. As she talked about the
events that had gotten her there, she was lucid and friendly; while she
still grew irked when talking about her neighbors, she showed scant
traces of the woman spewing bile in the videos. I asked her whether she
had found landing back behind bars to be—
“Relieving?” Fairley interjected. “Yes.”
Fairley continued to insist to me that she only stole a couple of times,
and she seemed to feel worse for herself than for the people she stole
from: “I never took anything that was somebody’s worldly possessions or
anything that was personal … I didn’t feel like it was that big to
them.” Still, as of last spring, Fairley knew the onus was now on her to
right her life: If she failed a second rehab program, the judge could
make her serve her year-long sentence in jail, diminishing her chances
of ever getting her daughter back. This time, she felt “a bit more
urgency” than when she was sent to the first program in the fall of
2018. When I told Arnold about Fairley losing her daughter, housing, and
possessions, he said, “You gotta have empathy, that sucks to be in that
position, but hopefully the city is throwing a lot of resources at her,
hopefully she takes advantage of it.”
In late spring, Fairley’s childhood history seemed to repeat itself: A
judge granted permanent guardianship of her daughter to the girl’s
great-aunt in the city, Mary Jane Boddie-Cobb, a 59-year-old woman who
works at the Department of Veterans Affairs. Over the last year, the
8-year-old has gotten a tutor at her new school to get up to grade
level, and Boddie-Cobb has been trying to help her break bad habits,
like taking things in the house that aren’t hers and claiming that she
“found” them. Boddie-Cobb hopes the girl can return to Fairley, or even
her nephew—the girl’s father—if they get themselves together, but now
that nearly two years have passed since Fairley first lost custody, the
bar is higher: She must proactively petition the court that it’s in her
daughter’s best interest to live with her and prove that there’s a
problem with the current placement.
That will require having a home, so Fairley told me she applied for the
public housing wait lists in San Francisco and nearby counties. It also
requires that she be drug free. In May, she showed up in San Francisco
court, where Judge Crompton sentenced her to a year in a Salvation Army
recovery program while on probation.
From his bench, Crompton (again) looked at Fairley (again) hunched over
the defense’s table in her orange jail sweats.
“This is an important day,” he said.
“Right,” she replied.
Crompton told her that, while he could give her more jail time if she
failed the program, his dream was for her to get clean and get her
daughter back. “I know that you can do these things,” he told her. “I
want to see you succeed.”
“Thank you,” Fairley said. Later that afternoon, she walked out of
county jail again—this time, to a rehab facility in a nearby colonnaded
building just three blocks away, to try to prove that history wasn’t
fate, and that she could change.
Even with Fairley gone from Potrero, the porch piracy has continued.
Last spring, Mark Arnold ordered a $24.38 multipack of Sloppy Joe sauce
on Amazon for an 1980s-themed Stranger Things premiere party. (Despite
writing to the judge that he had no choice but to move, Arnold still
lives in the same flat.) He forgot to change the delivery address to his
office—where he has everything sent these days—and it was taken before
he could pick it off his stoop. Arnold thought about reporting to Amazon
that the kit had been stolen, but decided to just order another set. The
thought of moving to a more bucolic locale was certainly appealing, he
told me; the city’s property crime remains high, and lately, he said,
he’s been looking into his options to get out. Even so, he didn’t want
to uproot his daughter. “That’s what’s made me such a pain in the ass,”
he said, referring to his neighborhood-watch habit.
Potrero’s conflict with Fairley herself is not over. Sometime in late
summer, Fairley left her Salvation Army program early. She skipped a
probation status hearing, and the judge issued new warrants for her
arrest. Around that time, Uzuri Pease-Greene spotted Fairley walking
through Potrero’s public housing. If she was planning to squat in her
old unit again, that wouldn’t be an option for long: The block’s
residents were moved earlier in the summer into their new homes in the
redevelopment plan, and the now-vacant buildings are set to be
demolished later this year. Mary Jane Boddie-Cobb told me that Fairley’s
daughter no longer asks as much about her mom.
Starting in mid-September, posts started popping up on the Neighbors app
showing Ring videos of someone—Fairley, it was clear to me—hitting
Potrero stoops. In one, she wrestles with something on the ground before
someone off-camera yells, “Get the fuck out of here, man!” (A commenter
wrote, “So satisfying. Jump him next time!”) Another video includes a
close-up of Fairley’s face as she grabs at something offscreen while
wearing a Rastafarian hoodie; in an accompanying post, the user explains
that a package had been ripped open but left in place. (Fairley couldn’t
be reached to comment on the videos; Banks declined to comment.)
This fall, Mark Arnold’s wife was trekking home from a Potrero bus stop
with their daughter when she spotted what looked like a familiar figure
in a baseball cap, with a warped left knee, a few blocks from where
Fairley used to walk home from school with her own daughter. The woman
wasn’t carrying any mail, or going up anybody’s steps, so Arnold’s wife
didn’t call the cops—nor did she take any photos, or post on Nextdoor.
But she did turn back for a last glimpse—surprised, after all, to see
her back in the neighborhood, after everything that had happened. The
woman in the baseball cap continued to stroll up the street: alone,
gazing up at homes, as if searching for something lost.
This article is part of our project “The Presence of Justice,” which is
supported by a grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur
Foundation’s Safety and Justice Challenge.
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2019/11/stealing-amazon-packages-age-nextdoor/598156/
complexities of race and class relations in a liberal, gentrifying city
This article is part of our project “The Presence of Justice,”
The Porch Pirate of Potrero Hill Can’t Believe It Came to This
When a longtime resident started stealing her neighbors’ Amazon
packages, she entered a vortex of smart cameras, Nextdoor rants, and
cellphone surveillance.
LAUREN SMILEY NOV 1, 2019 THE PRESENCE OF JUSTICEANIMATION AND
ILLUSTRATIONS BY ELIANA RODGERS
The first time Ganave Fairley got busted for stealing a neighbor’s
Amazon package, she was just another porch thief unlucky to be caught on
tape. In August 2016, a 30-something product marketing manager at
Google, expecting some deliveries, got an iPhone ping from his porch
surveillance camera as it recorded a black woman in a neon hoodie
plucking some bundles off his San Francisco stoop. After arriving home
that afternoon, the Googler got in his Subaru Impreza to hunt for any
remnants strewn around the streets of his Potrero Hill neighborhood.
Instead, he spotted Fairley herself, boarding a city bus, which he
trailed while dialing 911. Minutes later, he watched responding police
officers pull their cruiser in front of the bus and escort her off. The
Googler, sitting nearby in his car, played the Nest Cam tape for
them—Yep, it’s her—and the police pulled a $107.66 Apple Magic Keyboard
from Fairley’s purse and black tar heroin from her coin pocket. The
officers wrote Fairley a ticket with a court date a month later. “I
thought it was just a ticket, and that was it,” Fairley said.
It was only about nine months later, in May 2017, when one of Fairley’s
neighbors plastered photos of her, “Wanted”-style, on Nextdoor, that
Fairley realized things were about to get worse. Nextdoor is an online
ticker tape of homeowner and tenant concerns, and the grievances can be
particularly telling in a city of Dickensian extremes like San
Francisco, whose influx of tech wealth is pitting suburban expectations
against urban realities. The city’s property-crime rate is among the
highest in the United States. Nextdoor posts about dogs slurping from a
public drinking fountain and Whole Foods overcharging again (“Be on
guard”) show up alongside reports of smash-and-grab car break-ins,
slashed tires, and an entire crime subgenre of “porch pirates,” the
Artful Dodgers of the Amazon age.
Fairley and her neighbor do not agree—will likely never agree—on what
happened in the minutes prior to the photos of Fairley going up on
Nextdoor. Fairley has sworn that the boxes she picked up were from down
the street, where they had been laid out for the taking, and that her
6-year-old daughter was helping to haul them to their home in the public
housing down the block.
Julie Margett, a nurse who lives on the street, in a purple cottage with
a rainbow gay-pride flag and a black lives matter sign in the window,
said she was leaving her garage and spotted Fairley coming down her
neighbor’s stairs carrying boxes with various addresses on them.
Surmising that they were stolen, she asked Fairley warily, in her
British accent, “What are you doing?”
Fairley called her a racist (in fact, she still does) and told her she
was in the middle of moving. “That was what was so disarming about her,”
Margett told me. “Before you know it, she’s torn you to shreds and she’s
off down the block.” Margett snapped photos of the mother-daughter haul
act—in one, the young girl sticks her tongue out at the camera—and,
after calling the police, uploaded them into a Nextdoor post: “Package
thieves.”
So, Fairley told me two years later, sitting in an orange sweatsuit in a
county-jail interview room, that was the real acceleration of the epic
feud of Fairley v. Neighbors of Potrero Hill, a vortex of smart-cam
clips, Nextdoor rants, and cellphone surveillance that would tug at the
complexities of race and class relations in a liberal, gentrifying city.
The clash would also expose a fraught debate about who is responsible,
and who is to blame, for the city’s increasingly unlivable conditions.
As Fairley says, “It just got bigger and bigger and bigger.”
Parts of potrero hill feel like the sort of charmed place where Amazon
deliveries could sit undisturbed on your stoop. The hill’s western
ridge, overlooking the city, is filled with cozy bungalows and Victorian
houses that once were affordable for San Francisco’s working and
artistic classes but have appreciated during the tech rush; now most of
them sell for well over $1 million. The public hospital where Fairley
was born is now named after Mark Zuckerberg.
Meanwhile, the hill’s eastern and southern flanks are still lined with
decrepit 1940s-era bunkers of public housing between patches of scruffy
grass and concrete patios. The unhoused have set up camp around the
neighborhood too, the city’s homeless population having spiked 30
percent in the past two years. This sometimes has led to hostile and
politically divisive clashes, like when a luxury auction house at the
foot of Potrero turned its sprinklers on the tents clustered outdoors in
2016. (The auction house claimed that the sprinklers were meant to clean
the building and sidewalks, and were “not intended to disrespect the
homeless.”)
Read: Who’s really buying property in San Francisco?
Still, some residents, like Margett, said they were attracted to the
diversity in a city that is hemorrhaging people who don’t earn tech
paychecks. Margett said Potrero welcomed her, a white woman and a proud
lesbian sporting a Mohawk ponytail (“The pulse of the neighborhood, to
me, is more important than petty crime”), and the neighbors have dealt
with the glaring disparities in their own ways. Every week, Margett
picks up donations from big-box stores to take to homeless shelters; she
also puts them on the bench in front of her house, free for the taking.
A union-leader neighbor, Jason Rosenbury, showed the person he suspected
of stealing his succulent plants a Nest recording of the heist, and said
he wouldn’t report it to the police if he got the plants back. Upon
their return, he glued new pots to the concrete to avoid further strife.
“I’m a full-blown socialist,” he told me, “but I’m also for law and order.”
When I visited Margett, she said that in her interaction with Fairley,
the charged dynamic of “white-privileged homeowner” versus “someone who
is barely making it” was not lost on her, yet she didn’t consider
herself a bigot for calling out what she deduced was petty crime. “One
is always so concerned about not wanting to appear that way, and then
I’m second-guessing myself—Maybe I did leap to that conclusion because
she’s African American,” she recalled. “But no! I know what I saw.”
On view out of Margett’s rear window, a redevelopment plan for Potrero’s
public housing was under way. The run-down buildings are being razed,
and the dwellers are being moved into fancy new buildings next to
neighbors paying market rates, an upgrade that Fairley, who had at one
point moved to a new unit when her old one became infested with mold,
had been looking forward to.
Fairley is now 38, with close-cropped hair styled in braids. Among the
family members’ names tattooed on her neck, back, and arm are those of
her parents, next to praying hands; Fairley said she has forgiven them
for her chaotic early years in Potrero, when they were addicted to drugs
and she witnessed abuse. (She told me she prefers not to talk about the
painful particulars.) When Fairley was 5 years old, social workers
whisked her and her siblings to a great-aunt’s, where she told me she
had a sheltered childhood: therapy, church, road trips to Yosemite. In
middle school, she started flourishing at basketball and earned a
scholarship to a Catholic high school. But a knee injury shut down the
tuition aid, she said, and a transfer to public school introduced her to
a rough crowd. At 19, Fairley came out as gay and, more shocking to both
her and her family, pregnant.
Doctors started her on painkillers after complications giving birth to
her son, and Fairley liked how “sociable” she felt when taking them.
Since the pills were pricey, she turned to heroin and, later, meth.
She’d been in legal trouble as a young teen—for swiping more than $400
from Walmart, a misdemeanor, while cashiering—but the drug use
compounded her problems. Her older sister, Kai, told me that when
Fairley was clean, she was “brighter, more alive.” In 2006, Fairley was
convicted of a felony, for stealing more than $400 worth of gift cards
while working at Macy’s. For a while, she and her son stayed at a
girlfriend’s place and then a homeless shelter. In 2009, they landed a
unit back in Potrero’s public housing, but the stability didn’t solve
her problems. After her daughter’s birth, in 2010, Child Protective
Services took both of her children because of her alleged drug use.
Within a year, after she got clean and started trekking daily to a
methadone clinic, she got her kids back.
Her son was arrested as a teen and went to live in a group home, Fairley
said, but she dreamed of her daughter having a “normal” life—with “no
kind of abuse whatsoever,” she said. Fairley kept her home from
sleepovers and escorted her to the park and corner store. When her
daughter started kindergarten, in 2016, her teacher, Chloe Dietkus,
noted that the girl was always dressed sharply and, with her silly
bravado, easily made friends. “At the end of the day she’d always run
over to her mom,” Dietkus said, and they’d walk home, “seeming happy.”
Yet around that time, Fairley relapsed on drugs, and the deliveries that
were dropped daily on her neighbors’ porches caught her attention. At
that point, she didn’t know about the cameras or Nextdoor. In the months
that followed, the police would find a cache of the neighbors’
belongings and mail in her possession. Her sister told me that Fairley
generally sold the packages “for a little bit of nothing, just to get
high,” or ate any deliveries that contained food. (Police say thieves
generally sell their pickings on eBay, Craigslist, or to middlemen, who
may hawk them at flea markets.) Fairley insisted to me that she stole
only a small number of items—“I did it maybe once or twice, three times
at the most; it wasn’t like a new job I went into”—and that she sold
just one of them, a set of storage bins, for about $20. (She also told
me she stole mostly in order to buy necessities, not drugs.) She thought
the packages would be replaced by Amazon and other senders, so her gain
wouldn’t be her neighbors’ loss. “That’s what eased my conscience taking
someone’s property, because I’m not a bad person, it was just a bad
choice,” she told me. “I was in a desperate state.”
As Fairley started hitting the stoops, her neighbors took to Nextdoor to
discuss what to do. One group thought it was naive to expect a package
to sit undisturbed for hours on a city stoop. Another camp felt the
residents deserved the same rights to deliveries as in any other town. A
third group was the solutions crowd: They advised having the boxes
delivered to workplaces, or to Amazon Hub Locker, or with Amazon Key, a
smart-lock system that allows couriers to drop packages directly inside
a home or car. It turns out that while delivering packages is big
business, so is thwarting their theft.
Perhaps a bigger threat to Amazon than the cost of replacing stolen
goods is any hitch in its famously seamless service. In February 2018,
Amazon acquired Ring, the smart doorbell and camera company. The
official reason was to buoy neighborhood and home security, though much
of that crime would be people swiping Amazon packages. (Nest, one of
Ring’s main competitors, is owned by Google.)
Currently, 17 percent of American homeowners have a smart video
surveillance device, and unit sales are expected to double by 2023.
(Fairley was caught on Nest and another cam called Kuna, and several
neighbors filmed her on their phones.) The popularity of these devices
has led to the “porch pirate gotcha” film genre, a sort of America’s
Funniest Home Videos of petty crime. In 2018, a 30-something white woman
named Kelli Russell became viral international news for stealing boxes
from 21 Dallas neighbors while looking like she was on her way to yoga
class. “She’s blond and a former model, and it makes it explode,” her
attorney Tim Menchu told me.
(Yo! here you go!
These videos, whether they go viral or not, often appear first on
Facebook or Nextdoor. Nextdoor, a private company in San Francisco, was
recently valued at $2.1 billion when it raised funds from top Silicon
Valley investors. It relies on advertising for its revenue and has
capitalized on its neighborhood-watch vibe by selling ads to
home-security companies, including Ring (along with others such as ADT
and SimpliSafe)—though Nextdoor CEO Sarah Friar told me home security
doesn’t make up a huge proportion of their advertiser base, and only 5
percent of the site’s posts are in the crime and safety category. After
press about rampant racial profiling on the platform in 2015, the
company redesigned its app to prompt users who mention race to also
include descriptors like hair, clothing, and shoes, which the company
claimed reduced racial profiling by 75 percent.
Read: What Nextdoor posts reveal about America
Even so, Sierra Villaran, a San Francisco deputy public defender who
handled Fairley’s case early on, has seen how social media’s
rabble-rousing still leads to profiling of minorities and the poor. One
of her clients, a Latino man, was arrested after a resident mistook him
for someone recorded by their Ring device. (He was later released.) Not
only does an arrest go on an innocent person’s record and potentially
subject her to the use of force, Villaran said, it makes the accused
feel like the cops will take the word of accusers, who are usually
wealthier, over their own. Neighborhood surveillance and social media
aren’t “adding quality to their life, making them any more safe.”
Back in Potrero Hill, a man mistook Fairley’s sister for Fairley
herself, following her down the block and berating her as she passed out
fliers. “He didn’t believe me,” said Kai, who was working for a
community group at the time. “I was embarrassed, mostly.” She put her
hand up in front of her face as he tried to take a photo of her. Friar,
Nextdoor’s CEO, said that difficulty identifying people correctly is a
human problem, not one Nextdoor invented, but the company has formed an
anti-racial-profiling task force and continues to update the platform to
encourage users to “get out of your bird brain—that immediate
response—and into your cognitive brain, to pause and ultimately make a
better decision.”
The proliferation of porch cameras surely contributes to the
surveillance culture on Nextdoor and other social apps. Amazon’s Ring
division has been particularly aggressive in marketing its products,
including through city officials. Under the reasoning that more
surveillance improves public safety, over 500 police
departments—including in Houston and a stretch of Los Angeles
suburbs—have partnered with Ring. Many departments advertise rebates for
Ring devices on government social-media channels, sometimes offering up
to $125. Ring matches the rebate up to $50.
Dave Maass, a senior investigative researcher at the Electronic Frontier
Foundation, a nonprofit focused on digital civil liberties, said it’s
unseemly to use taxpayer money to subsidize the build-out of citizen
surveillance. Amazon and other moneyed tech companies competing for
market share are “enlisting law enforcement to be their sales force, to
have the cops give it their imprimatur of credibility,” said Maass, a
claim echoed in an open letter to government agencies from more than 30
civil-rights organizations this fall and a petition asking Congress to
investigate the Ring partnerships. (Ring disputes this characterization.)
Read: Amazon Ring will survive the anti-surveillance backlash
Ring maintains that offering the discount makes the device more
affordable, but Maass countered that, even with tax-subsidized rebates,
“things like doorbell cameras are not a purchase someone would make if
they already have trouble putting food on the table.” The cheapest
doorbell costs $99, before rebates; the ability to store or review
footage after the fact runs another $30 to $100 a year. “Does that mean
that police are protecting the property of affluent communities more
than the property of poor communities?” Maas asked.
In some cities, the relationship between the police and companies has
gone beyond marketing. Amazon is helping police departments run “bait
box” operations, in which police place decoy boxes on porches—often with
GPS trackers inside—to capture anyone who tries to steal them. Gearing
up for one such operation in December 2018, police in Jersey City, New
Jersey, exchanged emails, which I obtained through a public-records
request, with loss-prevention employees from Amazon and a
public-relations staffer from its Ring division. Amazon sent police free
branded boxes, and even heat maps of areas where the company’s customers
suffer the most thefts. Ring donated doorbells that police officers
installed on their own stoops to film thieves, and offered to coordinate
a PR campaign. At one point, the police department asked Ring if it
could extend a discount on Ring devices to all police staff, and Ring
obliged, offering $50 off.
After receiving news about the Jersey City sting’s early success—seven
arrests in three days during a soft launch, and a segment on Good
Morning America—Amazon’s Rob Gibson, then a senior program manager for
loss prevention, wrote in a December 13 email to the department, “Insane
how it took off! How many arrests now? You can bet on it that I am
coming out at some point to buy you a beer. You have helped me more than
you know here internally. I need a patch and any swag you have so I can
rep the PD here in Seattle.”
During the sting, Ring introduced the Jersey City police to another
program it offers: Police departments can join a Ring app called
Neighbors, on which residents (mostly Ring owners) broadcast their
footage to people nearby. If police want to solicit a user’s footage for
an active investigation, Ring will send the user an email with the
police request; if the user volunteers to cooperate, the footage is sent
back to the police, along with the user’s name, address, and email. As
part of the pitch to join, Ring offered the Jersey City Police
Department a free Ring device for every 20 residents who downloaded the app.
Meanwhile, Nextdoor allows police departments to join the app to post
neighborhood-level news and polls. For its part, Nest doesn’t actively
partner with police, but it does answer subpoenas: It received more than
100 requests from governments and courts last year, and provided user
data in about 25 percent of the cases. The tech also encourages people
to act like police: Captain Una Bailey of the San Francisco Police
Department told me about a case in which a resident had a picture of a
burglar from a Nest Cam, and digitally tracked a stolen laptop to a
homeless person’s tent—then called the police to make an arrest. “They
had taken all these steps that basically hand us an arrest on a silver
platter with all the evidence,” said Bailey. “I’m definitely an advocate
of people installing cameras.” (San Francisco’s police department hasn’t
participated in surveillance-device subsidies, the Neighbors app, or
bait-box operations, but has joined Nextdoor.)
Read: The police officer ‘Nextdoor’
Stings and porch-pirate footage attract media attention—but what comes
next for the thieves rarely gets the same limelight. Often, perpetrators
face punishments whose scale might surprise the amateur smart-cam
detectives and Nextdoor sleuths who help nail them. In Jersey City, the
bait-box operation netted 16 arrests in 10 days. Offenders may be routed
to drug treatment and housing, according to police emails to Amazon;
those with previous convictions could be eligible for jail time.
In December, the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Arkansas
announced an enforcement campaign called Operation Porch Pirate. Two
suspects were arrested and charged with federal mail theft. One pleaded
guilty to stealing $170.42 worth of goods, including camouflage crew
socks and a Call of Duty video game from Amazon, and was sentenced to 14
months of probation. Another pleaded guilty to possession of stolen
mail—four packages, two from Amazon—and awaits sentencing of up to five
years in prison and a $250,000 fine. Russell, the blond woman in Dallas,
ended up on two years of probation. The California legislature is
considering a bill that would elevate porch piracy to a burglary charge;
it would be a misdemeanor or a felony based, in part, on the suspect’s
criminal history.
While porch cams have been used to investigate cases as serious as
homicides, the surveillance and neighborhood social networking typically
make a particular type of crime especially visible: those lower-level
ones happening out in public, committed by the poorest. Despite the much
higher cost of white-collar crime, it seems to cause less societal
hand-wringing than what might be caught on a Ring camera, said W. David
Ball, a professor at Santa Clara University School of Law. “Did people
really feel that crime was ‘out of control’ after Theranos?” he said.
“People lost hundreds of millions of dollars. You would have to break
into every single car in San Francisco for the next ten years to amount
to the amount stolen under Theranos.”
That perspective was little comfort to San Franciscans in late 2017,
when the city was the nation’s leader in property crime. In Potrero,
Fairley had been captured on camera enough times, snatching packages or
walking down the street with bundles of mail, that many in the
neighborhood had a face and a name to attach to their generalized anger
about ongoing nuisances. Fairley was correct in thinking that, in many
cases, Amazon will replace pilfered packages. Her major miscalculation
was in thinking that her neighbors would, therefore, just shrug and move on.
In december 2017, Mark Arnold, the senior vice president of marketing
for a radiosurgery start-up, was working from home when he glanced out
at his stoop and snapped into high alert: Ganave goddamn Fairley! He cut
off a conference call without explanation and sprinted outside in his
socks, cuing up his cellphone camera. Arnold had been keeping an eye out
for Fairley all fall, since $691 of Walgreens, Target, and Burlington
Stores charges showed up on a Chase card that had been mailed to him and
that police had plucked out of Fairley’s backpack.
As he starts filming, Arnold confronts Fairley in a neighbor’s
stairwell, holding some sort of paper. “So what’s going on?” Arnold
asks, authoritatively. “We’ve got plenty of photos and videos of you
stealing things up and down this street.”
“You don’t have me stealing nothing,” Fairley snipes back. He asks if
her name is Ganave. She says it’s Jessica. “I pass out flyers every day
over here,” she insists—from Nextel (which closed years earlier)—and
adds, “Just because I’m African American don’t mean I can’t pass out
flyers!”
“This has zero to do with race,” Arnold interjects. Fairley shoots back
that it does. (Arnold is white.) Then she threatens him with a
harassment suit, and he says he’ll be forwarding the tape to the
district attorney. Fairley tells him that, when he does, he should
include a note of clarification: “I didn’t see her doing nothing, but
I’m assuming.”
After the spat, Arnold followed Fairley down the street, watching her
take other mail—“fearless,” as Arnold would later describe her to me—and
called the cops. He snapped a photo of Fairley for a forthcoming
Nextdoor report as the police came and detained her. Neighbors thanked
and high-fived him as he walked home, in socks, victorious—at least for
the hour.
Arnold is a fit 51-year-old dad, with an aggressive likeability
befitting his marketing job. He bought the flat he’d been living in a
decade ago, when Potrero home values were half what they are today. (“I
don’t consider myself wealthy by any stretch,” he said—which, in a city
that reportedly has the world’s highest density of billionaires, isn’t
entirely unreasonable.) At the time, he and Fairley lived within two
blocks of each other, and both fell into a zone where students score
poorly on tests and are given special priority in the school lottery.
Fairley doesn’t drive, and she sent her daughter to the school they
could walk to. Arnold sent his child to a higher-performing one farther
away. Arnold didn’t know many of his neighbors, but he had been bonding
with their online avatars on Nextdoor about their shared headache.
Arnold began combining the neighbors’ Fairley-related posts in a single
document. They started with the first dispatch, from May 2017, with
Margett photographing Fairley and her daughter. In October of that year,
a friend of Arnold’s, then a VP at Flipboard, followed Fairley in his
Prius, watching her go door to door collecting packages—a mail carrier
in reverse. In November, a cam caught a lithe woman who looked like
Fairley crawling up a home’s steps to seize a fat Amazon pouch of lug
nuts, a rosary dangling from her neck. Two weeks later, neighbors were
gardening on a shared strip of land when Fairley passed by balancing a
long lamp box on her shoulder. (Fairley claimed that the box contained
her own headboard and lampshade.) Seeing an address written in big
letters for a home in the opposite direction, one of them grabbed the
box and demanded to see an ID to prove Fairley lived there. A second man
called 911 as a woman videoed Fairley’s ensuing tirade: “That’s why
people get shot. You don’t pull somebody’s package off their fucking
arm,” Fairley snapped, then stalked off.
Two incidents—the Googler and the bus; the Prius calling in
Fairley—resulted in charges (petty theft, mail theft, receiving stolen
property, and possession of heroin—all misdemeanors), and tickets for
court dates. But Fairley regularly skipped her hearings—she’d lose track
of the dates, she later told me, and just had “a lot going on”—which
slowed the process of resolving the cases. Again and again, in her
absence, the judge would issue bench warrants, and Fairley would
eventually be arrested and booked into jail, from which the judge would
release her to await her next hearing, with demands that she report to
diversion programs or Narcotics Anonymous meetings—all while neighbors
continued to report on Nextdoor that they were watching her steal mail.
San Francisco County courts have long referred many low-level offenders
to rehabilitative programs while they are awaiting trial rather than
have them sit in jail. This practice endlessly angers the victims of the
property crimes, and concerns cops, too. “Our big request is for
consequences,” said Commander Raj Vaswani, who headed the district
responsible for Potrero at the time, adding that police typically only
pursue an arrest if a person or a camera directly witnesses the package
being stolen.
Yet locking up low-level criminals won’t solve what Ball, the Santa
Clara University law professor, believes is the root cause of these
crimes: poverty within astronomically expensive cities. “Everyone
assumes that jail works to deter people. But I don’t know if I were
hungry, and had no other way of eating, that that would deter me from
stealing,” he said.
Arnold thought the whole cycle looked like institutional apathy. Three
times, he walked up to the window at Vaswani’s station in the Bayview,
the southeastern-most district of San Francisco, which is among the
poorest, with high violent crime rates. The officers seemed underwhelmed
by his package gripes, saying that petty theft is a cite-and-release
sort of misdemeanor and asking, “What do you want us to do?” Arnold
would respond, “Prosecute her,” referring to Fairley. They said that was
the district attorney’s job.
Read: Why can’t San Francisco stop its epidemic of window smashing?
Vaswani acknowledged that his station was responding to two different
sets of resident concerns: “Violent crime might be targeted, and doesn’t
affect the average person walking their dog every morning.” He defended
his station’s response to the package theft, saying he dispatched a
bicycle officer to cut down on that kind of quality-of-life crime, which
isn’t seen as serious “but, to the average person that lives there and
pays really high rent, or has bought a really expensive house in a
really nice neighborhood such as Potrero Hill, … affects their daily lives.”
In January 2018, Arnold took time off from work to attend one of
Fairley’s hearings, at the suggestion of the prosecutor then handling
the case. (An organized group of San Franciscans also has taken to
sitting in on burglary cases to show elected judges that voters are
watching.) While Arnold sat in the courtroom, his wife texted that
Fairley wouldn’t be showing up: She was on their stoop that very moment,
apparently in the middle of another stealing expedition. (Fairley was
not charged in this alleged incident, and her lawyer declined to comment.)
Margett had retaliated against Fairley by placing her Boston terrier’s
poop in a decoy box on her stoop. (Someone picked it up; Margett doesn’t
know who.) Arnold watched a vigilante method online: having a blank
shotgun shell go off when someone lifts a decoy box. He feared that the
startled thief could fall down his stairs and sue him, and concluded
that it wouldn’t “end well.” He headed back to Nextdoor, reporting that
going to court had been a fiasco but that the judge had issued warrants
for Fairley’s arrest. He recommended that neighbors call 911 as soon as
they saw her, and that they “gather watertight evidence for the next trial.”
Word about Fairley had gotten back to her neighbors in public housing—at
least to Uzuri Pease-Greene, who runs a nonprofit community center out
of her building and serves as a safety liaison to the police.
Pease-Greene was one of the few residents of that part of the hill
active on Nextdoor back in 2014, and soon realized that she had stumbled
into “an upper-middle-class Facebook,” on which the house-dwelling folks
blamed people who lived in public housing for every woe. “They stepped
on a banana peel,” she said, “and would be like, ‘The projects put it
there!’”
On Nextdoor, Pease-Greene, a black woman, blasted stereotyping while
making it clear that she didn’t condone any shenanigans, no matter who
the perpetrator was. In a city with staggering racial disparities in its
criminal-justice system—African Americans make up only about 6 percent
of the population but more than half the county jail
inmates—Pease-Greene was privately relieved that the city’s thieves,
including those outed on Nextdoor, were of all races. “It’s sad that I
have to think like that, but it’s like, oh God, thank you!” she said.
“This is everybody doing it.”
Most comments about Fairley weren’t explicitly about her race, which
isn’t to say that they were gracious. Pease-Greene read some of the
men’s threats toward Fairley—which ranged from “Might as well taze her
next time she’s caught. Preferably put her in a coma” to wishes of “an
extremely swift kick in her saggy pants a$$”—and worried that the
writers might not be kidding. “When you get people that are talking like
that, who have white privilege, they’re not going to do any jail time,”
she said. Pease-Greene told an assistant district attorney she knew that
the clash was getting out of control, and she warned Fairley that
footage of her taking packages was all over Nextdoor.
Conor Friedersdorf: The undemocratic spread of Big Brother
While Fairley didn’t stop, and neighbors on Nextdoor vented that no one
cared about their complaints, authorities were, in fact, circling in.
They started exacting collateral with a much higher price than anything
Fairley took.
Fairley’s troubles started ramping up one night in November 2017, when
police spotted her in the Potrero projects and arrested her on bench
warrants. They added a child endangerment charge when the officers
dispatched to Fairley’s unit found that her daughter had wandered
outside, alone and upset. (The charge was later dropped.) Fairley had no
one to call to take her daughter, and the cops contacted Child
Protective Services, which eventually had her stay with a paternal
great-aunt.
Fairley cycled in and out of jail in the following months. She said that
with her daughter gone, she sometimes stopped getting her government
cash assistance, exacerbating the poverty that had initially led her to
steal mail. (She did, at points, still get food stamps.) Fairley said
her immediate need for money made it impossible to launch a job hunt. “I
live now, today. I have to eat tonight.” At one point, Arnold thought he
spotted her stealing produce at Whole Foods; he reported it to a
manager, but Fairley wasn’t charged. When told about this, Fairley’s
defense attorney, Brandon M. Banks, described Arnold as “the ring leader
in the smear campaign” against his client. “It is unfortunate that he
believed every time he saw Ms. Fairley at the grocery store or with a
package in her hand he believed she was stealing it.” Arnold, however,
argued that the evidence of Fairley’s thefts was “irrefutable.” “It’s
not a smear nor an opinion, just an unfortunate reality,” he said. “It’s
very disappointing [that] Banks has chosen to smear the victims.” Kai
told me that when she brought up stealing with her sister, Fairley would
say that “she has to do what she has to do, and someone else is going to
take it if she doesn’t.”
In January 2018, yet another neighbor grabbed a package out of Fairley’s
hand, and signed a citizen’s arrest form, leading to another charge of
petty theft. In February, a judge slammed Fairley with a stay-away order
for blocks where she’d been accused of stealing. In March, the police
and U.S. Postal Service inspectors rustled through Fairley’s unit with a
search warrant, finding clothes and other items she had been seen
wearing in cellphone and porch-cam footage, along with mail and
documents printed with the names of 40 different neighbors. After
missing yet more court dates that spring—resulting in more warrants,
more arrests—she was jailed again in April, and released the next month
with an ankle monitor.
Fairley’s time was up. Her landlord had issued warnings because of the
police visits to her unit, she told me. Fairley said that in June, she
found a “notice to vacate” on her door. Before she could challenge it,
sheriff’s deputies strode into her unit with an arrest warrant—she’d
missed another court date—and found her hiding under a gigantic blue
teddy bear. This time, the judge didn’t let her out of jail, and Fairley
couldn’t pay bail as the prosecutor pursued charges for the three
alleged stealing episodes. Banks stepped in from San Francisco’s
aggressive public defender’s office. Fairley rejected a plea bargain
that Banks considered a “terrible” deal (including a stay-away order
from Fairley’s surrounding neighborhood and, to his thinking, too much
jail time)—and the case of Ganave Fairley v. Neighbors of Potrero Hill
hurtled toward trial.
In august 2018, Fairley plunked herself behind the defense table for a
four-day blur of disputes over Nick’s solar panel battery switch,
Daniel’s Apple keyboard, Alexandra’s HelloFresh groceries, Sorcha’s
Montessori books, Micaela’s and Elizabeth’s checks, Samantha’s dog’s
probiotics, Jennifer’s, Jabari’s, and Brigette’s United credit cards,
and, by God, Dell’s hot sauce—representing a total of 23 misdemeanor
charges of “petty theft,” “receiving stolen property,” and “mail theft,”
plus the drug possession charge for the heroin found in Fairley’s pocket
back in August 2016 when this had all started.
The prosecutor, Jennifer Huber, told jurors that the case was “not a
whodunit: The defendant was caught red-handed stealing, over and over
and over again.” Fifteen neighbors testified, and the prosecutor showed
jurors the evidence they’d collected: The photo of Fairley’s daughter
sticking her tongue out at Julie Margett. The cellphone video of Fairley
sniping “That’s why people get shot” after the gardening neighbor took
the lamp box from her. The spat where she’d called Arnold a racist. None
of these incidents were charged as crimes but were admitted as evidence
of Fairley’s m.o., though Banks, the defense attorney, alleged that the
parade of squabbles was just to sully her character.
As Banks saw it, Fairley had been caught in a web of surveillance,
gentrification, and racism, in which vigilante neighbors targeted her
for anything that went missing, when, in fact, many other porch pirates
were also stealing in Potrero. She might have stolen some items, but not
everything she was being blamed for taking. “This case is about mob
mentality and the lowest-hanging fruit,” Banks declared in his opening
statement. “And the lowest-hanging fruit in this case is Ms. Fairley.”
Joshua Benton: The doorbell company that’s selling fear
He emphasized that she was a longtime resident of Potrero, a
neighborhood whose rising wealth had alienated her from her own
community. (To be fair, while some of the neighbors were relative
newcomers, several victims testified that they’d lived in Potrero for
decades.) Given that Fairley had been caught on tape stealing several
packages, and cops had recovered other items in her possession, some of
Banks’s case seemed to rest heavily on the “guilty beyond a reasonable
doubt” standard, focusing on the fact that several of the victims, such
as the man who had lost his subscription hot sauce, had never seen
Fairley taking the stolen items:
“Well, I guess, when did you first become aware that this hot sauce was
missing?”
“It’s hard to tell. I get them every month. So I don’t know.”
“You don’t know who took the hot sauce?”
“I don’t know who took it. Just, I recognize this”—the sauce found on
Fairley—“is definitely my hot sauce.”
(It was.)
Fairley told me that she was surprised by how angry the neighbors
seemed. In court, she wore a suit Banks had brought her from his
office’s wardrobe, and Arnold noticed that she had filled out in jail.
“She looked groomed, slept, and fed,” Arnold told me later. “It made me
believe she was being properly looked after.” When Arnold took the
stand, Banks tried to get him to admit that he’d badly wanted to get
Fairley arrested. “Do you normally post telling people that they should
call 911 irrespective of whether they see someone commit a crime or not?”
“I do not, normally. This is a very abnormal situation.”
Arnold’s credibility went mostly unscathed. Even so, Banks did succeed
in showing who gets the benefit of the doubt in Potrero. He asked the
gardening man who demanded identification from Fairley in the lamp box
episode whether he would investigate everyone walking down the street
with a package. His answer teetered on profiling: “If they look
suspicious, and it’s not their address” on the delivery. When Banks then
dug in to ask whether he thought Fairley was wearing something
suspicious, the man said, “She just had a hoodie, and she was carrying a
box from the next block down. I’ve never seen her in that block, and I
know a lot of people who live down there, so I assumed it wasn’t her box.”
While wealth and race disparities were obvious in the courtroom, they
weren’t on trial. Nor was the citizen surveillance facilitated by porch
cams and Nextdoor to the benefit of corporations and venture
capitalists. Nor were such lofty systemic issues as the criminalization
of poverty and addiction. The question was simply: Did 12 jurors think
Fairley once had heroin in her possession and had stolen some items?
(Mid-trial, the prosecutor reduced the 24 counts to 16, of drug
possession, theft, and receiving stolen property.)
After a day of deliberations, the jury returned a packet of verdict
sheets on which one of them had scrawled “GUILTY,” determining that
Fairley had committed every act she was charged with. They even
convicted her of stealing when they had been given the alternative of
finding that she merely possessed stolen items.
In sum: She was found guilty of the drug charge, of five counts of
receiving stolen property (one was later thrown out), and of every
single theft.
The case continues to be litigated, both in and out of the courtroom.
Her lawyer filed an appeal, which is ongoing as of this writing, arguing
that each stealing spree should have constituted a single conviction,
rather than each stolen item. And in Potrero, Fairley and the neighbors
weren’t done with each other yet.
Ahead of fairley’s sentencing hearings in August and September, four
neighbors submitted victim statements to detail the toll the crimes had
taken. Read aloud in the courtroom by the prosecutor, Arnold’s topped
them all: He’d written that his home “no longer feels sacred,” adding
that Fairley’s remark about people getting shot made him fear
retribution. He had no choice, he’d written, but to move out of the
city. Fairley thought he was exaggerating, to force her out of the
neighborhood instead.
Judge Charles Crompton acknowledged that economic necessity had
contributed to Fairley’s actions, and sentenced her to a minimum of one
year in a full-time drug rehab program—the first stage of three years of
probation—and imposed a stay-away order from the blocks she’d targeted.
Fairley, having been kicked out of her Potrero unit while in jail and
pushed into the city’s growing ranks of homeless people, was heartened
by the news of the residential program. At least it would be a roof over
her head.
Yet during her first week at the rehab program, in mid-October, Fairley
learned that having taken other people’s stuff meant that she had lost
all of hers; everything in her unit had been thrown out because she
hadn’t been around to claim her possessions. Losing photo albums with
her children’s pictures in them hurt the worst: “No memories, nothing,”
she told me. Since she was no longer a resident of Potrero’s public
housing, she had also lost her chance to move into the incoming
redeveloped complex. Then, within a month of arriving at the rehab
program, she failed three drug tests—meth, she said—and was kicked out.
At the time, her sister, Kai, was squatting in a Potrero public housing
unit, and says Fairley initially stayed with her, telling Kai that she
hadn’t expected to “come home to nothing.” Then Fairley climbed through
a window into her old, now-empty unit in Potrero and began sleeping
there on cushions she had scavenged. She didn’t call her daughter on
Halloween or Christmas; the girl told the great-aunt who’d taken her in
that her mom was “lost.” When Fairley was a no-show for a December 26
probation hearing, the judge once again called for her arrest.
She wasn’t lost for long. Back in Potrero, Julie Margett opened her door
late one night in December to her union-leader neighbor, Jason
Rosenbury, who was bringing her some homemade cooked collard greens. He
told her that someone was sleeping on top of the clothes she had put on
her bench for people to take. The sleeping woman heard him, rustled, and
said to Margett, in a friendly tone, “I know you from court!”
Margett was stunned. “Are you Ganave?” Fairley said she was. With no
apparent rancor toward the woman who’d first put her on Nextdoor,
Fairley told Margett she’d gained a lot of weight in jail and had
stopped stealing. She added that she’d lost everything and had nowhere
to go. Margett told her she couldn’t sleep on the bench, but suggested a
women’s shelter in a nearby neighborhood and gave her a jacket, along
with some sparkling water and chips. Fairley said she’d move to a bench
up the street and ambled off.
On New Year’s Day, a new post entitled “A bold daytime porch thief”
appeared on Potrero’s Nextdoor. A software engineer at Square had posted
a Nest Cam video of a woman jauntily striding up to his entryway and
checking inside a utility box where postal workers leave deliveries, a
package already tucked under her arm. Margett dove into the comments:
“OMG—I think that’s Ganave Fairley?”
Mark Arnold wrote that it was her—noting her inward-jutting left
knee—and urged people to call 911 if they spotted her doing anything
illegal, including stepping foot in the stay-away zone.
Uzuri Pease-Greene, Nextdoor’s unofficial public housing spokeswoman,
had been rooting for Fairley. She saw the new post, too, and thought,
Son of a bitch.
Squatting in her unit and having lost her daughter and her belongings,
Fairley was apparently back to what had gotten her into this mess in the
first place. A month later, in a new Nest video shot at the same
entryway, Fairley was seen mumbling to herself, tripping on a recycling
bin on her way down the sidewalk. (Fairley told me she wasn’t interested
in talking about the videos.) Ten days later, cops found her in her
former unit and hauled her back to jail on warrants.
I visited Fairley in jail several times this past spring while she was
waiting for another rehab program to accept her. As she talked about the
events that had gotten her there, she was lucid and friendly; while she
still grew irked when talking about her neighbors, she showed scant
traces of the woman spewing bile in the videos. I asked her whether she
had found landing back behind bars to be—
“Relieving?” Fairley interjected. “Yes.”
Fairley continued to insist to me that she only stole a couple of times,
and she seemed to feel worse for herself than for the people she stole
from: “I never took anything that was somebody’s worldly possessions or
anything that was personal … I didn’t feel like it was that big to
them.” Still, as of last spring, Fairley knew the onus was now on her to
right her life: If she failed a second rehab program, the judge could
make her serve her year-long sentence in jail, diminishing her chances
of ever getting her daughter back. This time, she felt “a bit more
urgency” than when she was sent to the first program in the fall of
2018. When I told Arnold about Fairley losing her daughter, housing, and
possessions, he said, “You gotta have empathy, that sucks to be in that
position, but hopefully the city is throwing a lot of resources at her,
hopefully she takes advantage of it.”
In late spring, Fairley’s childhood history seemed to repeat itself: A
judge granted permanent guardianship of her daughter to the girl’s
great-aunt in the city, Mary Jane Boddie-Cobb, a 59-year-old woman who
works at the Department of Veterans Affairs. Over the last year, the
8-year-old has gotten a tutor at her new school to get up to grade
level, and Boddie-Cobb has been trying to help her break bad habits,
like taking things in the house that aren’t hers and claiming that she
“found” them. Boddie-Cobb hopes the girl can return to Fairley, or even
her nephew—the girl’s father—if they get themselves together, but now
that nearly two years have passed since Fairley first lost custody, the
bar is higher: She must proactively petition the court that it’s in her
daughter’s best interest to live with her and prove that there’s a
problem with the current placement.
That will require having a home, so Fairley told me she applied for the
public housing wait lists in San Francisco and nearby counties. It also
requires that she be drug free. In May, she showed up in San Francisco
court, where Judge Crompton sentenced her to a year in a Salvation Army
recovery program while on probation.
From his bench, Crompton (again) looked at Fairley (again) hunched over
the defense’s table in her orange jail sweats.
“This is an important day,” he said.
“Right,” she replied.
Crompton told her that, while he could give her more jail time if she
failed the program, his dream was for her to get clean and get her
daughter back. “I know that you can do these things,” he told her. “I
want to see you succeed.”
“Thank you,” Fairley said. Later that afternoon, she walked out of
county jail again—this time, to a rehab facility in a nearby colonnaded
building just three blocks away, to try to prove that history wasn’t
fate, and that she could change.
Even with Fairley gone from Potrero, the porch piracy has continued.
Last spring, Mark Arnold ordered a $24.38 multipack of Sloppy Joe sauce
on Amazon for an 1980s-themed Stranger Things premiere party. (Despite
writing to the judge that he had no choice but to move, Arnold still
lives in the same flat.) He forgot to change the delivery address to his
office—where he has everything sent these days—and it was taken before
he could pick it off his stoop. Arnold thought about reporting to Amazon
that the kit had been stolen, but decided to just order another set. The
thought of moving to a more bucolic locale was certainly appealing, he
told me; the city’s property crime remains high, and lately, he said,
he’s been looking into his options to get out. Even so, he didn’t want
to uproot his daughter. “That’s what’s made me such a pain in the ass,”
he said, referring to his neighborhood-watch habit.
Potrero’s conflict with Fairley herself is not over. Sometime in late
summer, Fairley left her Salvation Army program early. She skipped a
probation status hearing, and the judge issued new warrants for her
arrest. Around that time, Uzuri Pease-Greene spotted Fairley walking
through Potrero’s public housing. If she was planning to squat in her
old unit again, that wouldn’t be an option for long: The block’s
residents were moved earlier in the summer into their new homes in the
redevelopment plan, and the now-vacant buildings are set to be
demolished later this year. Mary Jane Boddie-Cobb told me that Fairley’s
daughter no longer asks as much about her mom.
Starting in mid-September, posts started popping up on the Neighbors app
showing Ring videos of someone—Fairley, it was clear to me—hitting
Potrero stoops. In one, she wrestles with something on the ground before
someone off-camera yells, “Get the fuck out of here, man!” (A commenter
wrote, “So satisfying. Jump him next time!”) Another video includes a
close-up of Fairley’s face as she grabs at something offscreen while
wearing a Rastafarian hoodie; in an accompanying post, the user explains
that a package had been ripped open but left in place. (Fairley couldn’t
be reached to comment on the videos; Banks declined to comment.)
This fall, Mark Arnold’s wife was trekking home from a Potrero bus stop
with their daughter when she spotted what looked like a familiar figure
in a baseball cap, with a warped left knee, a few blocks from where
Fairley used to walk home from school with her own daughter. The woman
wasn’t carrying any mail, or going up anybody’s steps, so Arnold’s wife
didn’t call the cops—nor did she take any photos, or post on Nextdoor.
But she did turn back for a last glimpse—surprised, after all, to see
her back in the neighborhood, after everything that had happened. The
woman in the baseball cap continued to stroll up the street: alone,
gazing up at homes, as if searching for something lost.
This article is part of our project “The Presence of Justice,” which is
supported by a grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur
Foundation’s Safety and Justice Challenge.