(CBS) Apparently there's more than one way to fix the kitchen faucet.

As CBS San Francisco reports, police arrested a California couple on Monday after they allegedly took a handyman hostage and forced him to do home repairs.

Investigators said the 50-year-old handyman was lured to the 4,600-square-foot home south of San Jose on Monday morning, where 36-year-old Jason DeJesus and 33-year-old Chanelle Troedson beat him and threatened to kill him, forcing him to do so The problem was addressed to multiple items in the house over a six hour period. Repairs included a dishwasher and a broken door.

“The victim was quite scared. “He was pretty shaken and frightened by the whole incident,” Sgt. Jose Cardoza of the Santa Clara County Sheriff's Office.

Cardoza said the handyman worked for DeJesus' mother two months ago, which she didn't like.

“There was a dispute over services provided, the victim was not paid in full,” Cardoza said Tuesday. “That kind of impacted what happened last night.”

Authorities said the suspects forced the victim into his truck later Monday night, where he was told they were driving to a relative's home to make further repairs. When they stopped at a gas station to pay for gas and snacks, the victim escaped. The suspects were arrested shortly afterwards.

DeJesus and Troedson are charged with multiple crimes, including false imprisonment, kidnapping, assault with a deadly weapon, criminal threats and conspiracy.

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San Francisco lawmakers are mulling a proposed law that would allow police to use private security cameras – think: those in residential doorbells, medical clinics, and retail shops – in real time for surveillance purposes.

The US city’s Rules Committee was due to vote on the draft ordinance on Monday, and this was pushed out by at least a week by the panel; its members indicated they would vote on an amended proposal July 18 at the soonest.

Matt Cagle, an attorney for the ACLU, called the proposal for a “power grab” by the SF cops. “It is rare for a police agency to seek to tap into privately owned cameras — I haven’t seen that in California before,” he told The Register. “This is the police seeking permission to proactively and affirmatively go out to private camera owners and say hey, can we live-stream your cameras? This is unprecedented in the city’s history.”

The proposal [PDF] expands San Francisco’s 2019 surveillance ordinance, which, among other things, requires the police to seek authorization from the public and elected officials before acquiring and deploying surveillance systems. So if it weren’t for this law, the cops could monitor citizens without the public even knowing.

The 2019 law also limited the cops’ access to and usage of real-time video footage from things like Internet-of-Things cameras and security CCTV, and the police department and mayor say this hamstrings their ability to fight crime.

The new proposal – championed by Mayor London Breed after November’s wild weekend of orchestrated burglaries and theft in the San Francisco Bay Area – would authorize the police department to use non-city-owned security cameras and camera networks to monitor live “significant events with public safety concerns” and ongoing felony or misdemeanor violations.

Currently, the police can only request historical footage from private cameras related to specific times and locations, rather than blanket monitoring. Mayor Breed also complained the police can only use real-time feeds in emergencies involving “imminent danger of death or serious physical injury.”

If approved, the draft ordinance would also allow SFPD to collect historical video footage to help conduct criminal investigations and those related to officer misconduct. The draft law currently stands as the following, which indicates the cops can broadly ask for and/or get access to live real-time video streams:

Obtaining video footage from private security cameras has real public-safety benefits and would help officers arrest drug dealers and looters in real time, San Francisco Police Chief Bill Scott told lawmakers on Monday.

“What we’d like to do is be able to, in the appropriate circumstances, live monitor this activity as it’s occurring, so we can have a better chance of apprehending those committing those acts,” he said.

What we’d like to do is be able to, in the appropriate circumstances, live monitor this activity as it’s occurring

If the proposal successfully passes out of the committee during next week’s hearing, it still requires approval by the San Francisco Board of Supervisors before it becomes law. And it faces significant public opposition in the meantime.

Cagle said San Francisco Supervisors have received “hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of messages in just the last few days” from residents who oppose the proposal. And he pointed to a survey [PDF] of 372 likely voters, commissioned by the ACLU, that found 60 percent of San Franciscans oppose letting the police use private cameras to monitor people.

In a joint letter [PDF]17 organizations including the ACLU of Northern California, EFF, social justice center GLIDE, and the San Francisco Public Defender’s Office, urged the Board of Supervisors to oppose or “significantly amend” the policy, which they say will “allow the SFPD to engage in unprecedented live surveillance” via thousands of private cameras.

It could allow SFPD to share video footage of, say, women visiting medical clinics that provide abortions with out-of-state prosecutors, or undocumented immigrants going to work with federal immigration agents, the organizations argued. We note that San Francisco is a sanctuary city.

“We are deeply concerned that SFPD’s proposal, if approved as written, threatens the privacy and safety of people going to work and school, accessing housing and seeking social services that make our city healthy and safe,” the letter said.

Opponents argue that the proposal would be used to criminalize Black and Brown people, activists, immigrants, LGBTQ people, and Muslims. And if lawmakers don’t toss the surveillance expansion outright, the groups want the supes to at least set limits on what the cops can surveil, how long they can retain the data collected from private cameras, and with whom they can share the video footage .

As it’s currently written, the proposal would allow police to spy on First Amendment activities, such as political protests or religious gatherings, and keep all footage on file for as long as officers wanted.

“This concern is far from hypothetical: EFF and the ACLU of Northern California sued the city after SFPD used a business district’s camera network to live-monitor protests for eight days following the police murder of George Floyd in the summer of 2020,” EFF policy analyst Matthew Guariglia wrote in a blog post.

Over the next week, lawmakers are expected to meet police and incorporate some changes into the surveillance proposal.

“Any time a government builds a surveillance system that collects information about people, that system can be vulnerable to misuse by other agency, and this allows the SFPD to share collected footage with very few limitations,” Cagle said. “What we are saying is, if we care about reproductive justice, if we care about stopping police violence, if we care about protecting activists, than we should do everything we can to boost protection rather than increasing surveillance.” ®

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On Apr. 10, a video went viral after it was posted online because it showed a driverless GM Cruise car getting pulled over in San Francisco, California, by police who found the car did not have any driver behind the wheel.

Driverless Cruise Car Got Pulled Over by Cops

The video was originally posted on Apr. 1, but it did not go viral until nine days after. It showed a GM Cruise car getting pulled over to the side of the road and stopped as a cop approached the driver’s side before accelerating to cross an intersection and pull off further down the road.

A bystander can be heard yelling their disbelief when no driver was seen inside the car even though it was moving.

GM Cruise posted on its corporate Twitter account and said that the Cruise behaved as expected. GM Cruise said that their AV yielded to the police vehicle, then pulled over to the nearest safe location, as intended.

An officer contacted a GM Cruise personnel, and there was no citation issued.

Also Read: Cruise lets you convert your jalopy into Google-type self-driving car for just $10,000

GM Cruise told CNBC that the San Francisco Police Department has a dedicated phone number available at all times for officers and authorities to call when the automaker’s driverless vehicles get pulled over.

The San Francisco Police Department did not immediately return requests for more information about the situation.

The episode showed some of the situations that can happen as driverless cars become more common on the streets of San Francisco.

GM Cruise is a GM subsidiary, and it began to offer nighttime rides to the public in early 2022 in San Francisco in driverless cars, even though it is not yet charging and riders need to apply for a waitlist first.

Waymo, a subsidiary of Alphabet, is planning to offer free driverless rides in its cars in San Francisco to members of a testing program and has completed thousands of rides without a driver in Arizona.

Nuro has a deployment permit to operate driverless cars in San Francisco as well, but the startup is mainly focused on delivery and not taxi service.

GM Gets Approval for Driverless Vehicles

According to Arstechnica, on Feb. 22, GM Cruise was able to successfully get permission from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration or NHTSA to put the driverless vehicles into commercial service.

Cruise stated that the vehicle is a zero-emission, shared, electric vehicle that has been designed from the ground up to operate without a human driver. This means that it does not rely on certain human-centered features, like a steering wheel, to operate.

Cruise said that its petition in Feb. demonstrates how the Origin objectives of existing standards safely and helps enable future autonomous vehicle regulations.

The AV cars will be manufactured at GM’s Factory Zero in Michigan. According to Reuters, the production is expected to increase in 2022 and will go nationwide in 2023.

The GM Cruise driverless vehicles can be used as robotaxis that can pick up deliveries and people. The vehicle can work on busy streets, highways, and intersections.

Related Article: General Motors, Cruise Unveil Modified Chevrolet Bolt EVs As First Self-Driving Car For Mass Production

This article is owned by Tech Times

Written by Sophie Webster

ⓒ 2021 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.

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Serina Calhoun has worked as an architect in San Francisco for 21 years and has faced plenty of headache-inducing projects, but the renovation of a Bernal Heights fixer-upper that she took on in 2020 stands out as truly atrocious.

Many of the city’s worst story lines converged at the seemingly cursed house, leaving Calhoun and the home’s owners slack-jawed by all the plot twists.

It involves insanely high real estate prices. Byzantine planning codes that even the city’s planners find confusing. Neighbors who demand a say in any change near them. Squatters, drugs and vandalism. Police officers who blame the district attorney as they let criminals go. A pricey private security guard. And heaps of frustration.

Sounds like San Francisco, alright.

“This is a whole other level of crazy,” Calhoun said.

It all began in October 2020 when Jennifer Sun and her husband, Ben, purchased a house in Bernal Heights for $1.75 million. In most parts of the country, that would buy a stunning mansion. In San Francisco, it buys a rather dated fixer-upper.

The couple are wealthy, and nobody but them will shed any tears over their home remodel gone awry. Still, what happened next points to what’s broken in San Francisco — and so much is broken.

A sticker, writing on the refrigerator and a sign are some of the damage left over from squatters who trespassed and lived in the home of a Bernal Heights couple.

Lea Suzuki/The Chronicle

The couple hired Calhoun to design a remodel, submitted their plans in March 2021 and hoped to secure permits within six months. They kept paying rent on their South of Market apartment so they could live there during the remodel, while also paying their new mortgage.

But six months turned into 12 months — and still, no permits.

The first hiccup was that the Planning Department said the home had been illegally converted into three units by a previous owner, and the couple wanted to restore it to its original single-family home set-up.

After some back and forth, the Planning Department said the plan was allowable because there was no record of any tenants ever living there.

Dan Sider, chief of staff for the Planning Department, said planners were ready to approve the plans including major interior work in July 2021, but then the couple submitted a proposal with a new wrinkle: extending the back of their home by just under 3 feet . That would make the back of the house even since the third story juts out beyond the lower two.

But this being San Francisco, and especially Bernal Heights, that seemingly small change is a very big deal. That’s because of a “special use district” approved by the Board of Supervisors in 1991 that governs every little change to homes in the neighborhood. The idea was to preserve the area’s character, but the details will make your eyes glaze over and, according to Calhoun, have prompted many architects in the city to refuse to work there.

In sections and subsections to subsections, it governs changes to homes in minute detail — down to the allowable width of curb cuts and garage doors.

“I can assure you that it is not a page-turner,” Sider said good-naturedly.

Jennifer Sun stands below two holes in the ceiling of her home, part of the damage from squatters. She and her husband have had to hire private security while they wait for permits to remodel their new home.

Lea Suzuki / The Chronicle

A group of neighbors called the Bernal Heights East Slope Design Review Board — with no apparent website or easy way to find them — gets to weigh in on projects in the area. An email sent to an address associated with the group was not returned.

The rules include the length of a home can extend into the backyard from the front of its property line. But because the couple’s house sits on a curved lot, Calhoun’s been trying to get an answer on where on the front lot to start measuring from. She said she waited until November just to get a planner assigned and has spoken to four different planners about the 3-foot extension, and that none knows the answer.

“They shared that the code is confusing even for them,” she said.

Then, the planner told Calhoun the home was historic and the facade — though nondescript — could not be altered. Sorting that out would have extended the project by another six to nine months, Calhoun said, so the couple dropped proposed changes to the front.

Then things got really weird.

In February, Calhoun received an email from a member of the Bernal Heights East Slope Design Review Board who reported a neighbor across the street from the couple’s home had grown “increasingly agitated” by the couple’s lifestyle and the cars coming and going from the home at every hour.

Sun said she was shocked. They weren’t living there. What cars? What lifestyle?

So they visited the property, which had weird spray paint across the garage door and signs of people inside. They called police, who accompanied them inside the house where they found squatters had taken it over.

Photos the couple took show piles of furniture, clothes and a fridge full of food. Graffiti covers the refrigerator and walls. One message can’t be relayed in full because of antigay language, but it reads in part, “No soliciting. No shopping. No snitches.” They bashed holes in the walls and ceilings, wrecked a sink and other fixtures, left dog poop on the carpets and discarded needles and syringe caps around the house. Flies were everywhere. The house still smells bad.

According to the couple, police officers gave the squatters — all of whom appeared high — 10 minutes to collect their belongings and leave. They arrested only one. No one else faced any consequences. The couple said police explained there was nothing they could do because District Attorney Chesa Boudin “has different priorities right now” and wouldn’t prosecute.

Salar Naderi, a spokesperson with the Police Department, confirmed police found seven people occupying the house and arrested Richard Ostergard, 47, who had warrants for stealing a vehicle, possession of stolen property and theft. Naderi said the homeowners “did not want to have any of the (other) subjects cited or arrested,” disputing the couple’s version.

In any case, Sun, 36, said that just a few hours later, neighbors texted and called to tell her the squatters were back. And it doesn’t sound like they’re merely people down on their luck. Photos show nice belongings, and neighbors reported them driving a Mercedes, BMW and Dodge Durango.

Neighbors continued to report to the couple that people were entering the home over the next couple of days, and that someone tried to access the property with a crowbar.

The couple quickly hired a private security guard whom they’re paying $8,000 a month to watch over the house every night.

“If we had known the city would take so long, we would have moved in and this wouldn’t be an issue,” Sun said.

Even though they’re doing well professionally, the couple said the costs have created “an immense financial impact” — and work hasn’t even started yet. Mortgage payments and property taxes on the house have topped $180,000 so far. They paid $3,000 to haul away the squatters’ belongings and don’t know yet how much it will cost to repair their damage.

Meanwhile, construction costs keep growing because of inflation and supply chain shortages, and there’s no telling how much the remodel will end up costing or when they can finally start.

“How does anyone afford this?” Sun asked.

Sun said she’s no longer excited about moving in after the remodel — which she thinks won’t be done for another year at best.

“It totally creeps me out,” she said. “Just unlocking the door, I get goose bumps. It’s uncomfortable being in here. It’s so unnerving. This is supposed to be home.”

This being San Francisco, there is one bit of good news for the couple. Redfin says their dream home turned nightmare is now worth more than $2 million.

San Francisco Chronicle columnist Heather Knight appears Sundays and Wednesdays. Email: hknight@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @hknightsf

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Two people were arrested with £ 15,000 of illegal fireworks and $ 1 million in cash after Sept.

In early May, the Sheriff’s Office’s crime-fighting unit opened an investigation into a large line of illegal fireworks distribution. During the investigation, two people identified as Sam San, 61, from San Francisco, and Jennifer Nguyen, 54, from San Jose, were linked to the fireworks sales in San Mateo County. Through surveillance, detectives identified two apartment buildings and a warehouse in Oakland that are linked to the operation.

San has been detained in the San Mateo County Jail and Nguyen is currently on charges of her involvement.

The sheriff’s office is reminding residents that all fireworks are illegal in unincorporated areas of San Mateo County, as well as in the cities it serves. Fines of up to $ 1,000 can be imposed.

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A creepy handyman admitted hiding cameras in bathrooms in homes in Paramus and Wayne, New Jersey, police said.

Romeo Sanchez, 47, of West New York, was arrested on September 17 for invasion of privacy by Paramus police after a homeowner who hired him to install a window discovered a suspicious device in her bathroom in late August reported WABC.

The device, which police said was inserted into a bathroom wall, was later classified as a micro-camera with a memory card, the station reports.

The homeowner saw the device plugged into an electrical outlet in the bathroom and knew it was “not hers,” Paramus police officer Mark Pinajian told CBS New York.

The victim then saw clips on the device showing herself and her bathroom as well as another location, Pinajian said.

Investigators set out to track down Sanchez, a married father, who admitted to having the camera installed in the Paramus house – and claimed he intended to retrieve her when he returned to finish work, police said With.

The other location pictured on camera was a bathroom in a house in Wayne where Sanchez was also being hired for a job, police said.

No children were present in either house and there is no evidence that Sanchez distributed the video, CBS New York reported.

“As far as we can see, he’s not a licensed contractor,” said Pinajian. “He’s like a handyman doing little things and he’s been referred to other people. That’s how he got into business. “

Investigators are investigating Wayne’s home there, Paramus police said. Wayne police have not returned a message asking for comment on the case, NorthJersey.com reported.

Sanchez, who served up to a year in prison, has been released pending a trial, reports NJ.com.

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