Title: City Council member · chairs the Public Safety Committee · behavioral-health provider/social worker; council’s only Latino member In this role since: Dec 2, 2024 (elected Nov 2024, first term) Current term ends: Dec 2028 Next voter decision: not on a ballot until Nov 2028 · Election 2026
Surveillance record
The RTIC’s most vocal advocate on council. Voted yes on May 12, 2026, and authored the accompanying “civil liberties resolution” stating the technology would be used “solely for lawful purposes, which are intended to enhance or provide for public safety”, a statement of intent with no enforcement mechanism, no reporting duty, and no penalties. (BPR)
In his words
At the March 25, 2025 council meeting, arguing for the first RTIC funding (BPR, Mar 26, 2025):
“When you actually responsibly deploy technology like drones and real time intelligence, what you do is you actually de-escalate the risk for officers and our citizens.” And: “You’re removing the need to send an officer blindly into a dangerous situation and that lowers the chance of use-of-force incidents.” He pointed to Durham: “They didn’t throw out public safety, they modernized it.”
He also claimed, same meeting (37:05): “Over 95% of our APD officers are trained in crisis intervention”; the last public figure was 90%, and DOJ’s evidence clearinghouse rates CIT “Ineffective” at reducing use of force.
The full researched counter (no study anywhere has ever measured drones or RTCCs reducing use of force; the false-positive record runs the other way; and his own example city, Durham, rejected ShotSpotter, declined an RTCC, and scaled unarmed response instead) is in Their Claims vs. The Record.
Three more of his on-record claims, from the transcript archive:
- The “chairs” defense (Council, March 25, 2025, 32:30): “Just to be clear, the real time intelligence center already exists. We’re not buying surveillance. We’re buying chairs and workstations for the officers to do their job.” He repeated it minutes later: the center “already exists… The funding buys basic infrastructure like desk, chairs, workstations.” The defense contains an admission: the surveillance center already existed, built and operating before council ever voted on it. And the reassurance didn’t even hold within the meeting: Chief Lamb, answering questions moments later, said APD didn’t yet have “the Fusus software… or the finalized agreement with Axon.”
- The bias claim (Public Safety Committee, July 31, 2025): license plate readers “would actually eliminate a lot of the bias from officers… they wouldn’t be pulling over like profiling.” The record cuts against it: LAPD’s audit found a 32.3% false-positive rate that produces guns-drawn stops of innocent people, and those stops don’t fall evenly. Automated stops don’t remove bias: the false hits fall unevenly too, and the machine makes the stop look neutral.
- The one-camera argument (Agenda briefing, May 7, 2026): keeping “that one Flock camera is a strategic public safety move,” and removing all of them “puts every single 100,000 residents at risk”; “until Axon has the type of database that we can access like Flock.” His own condition concedes the point: the plan preserves the national search account until the vendor is swapped, not until the surveillance ends. See Getting Flock Out.
Two more threads from the committee record, in his own words:
- His conversion story (council, May 7, 2026): “I had to sit with public safety officials, IT folks, tour the place. I had to like hear things over and over before I really started to understand it.” By his own account, he was convinced by repeated sessions with the people selling and operating the system, not by independent research. The leaked vendor playbook calls this the pre-brief; he’s describing it from the inside.
- The panhandling defense (Public Safety Committee, July 31, 2025): after eleven callers opposed expanding the solicitation ordinance, he explained that opponents misunderstand “the way that science and data collection works,” insisted “in no way are we criminalizing homelessness or poverty,” and invoked his own practice: “this is my job. I work in this every day… These are my people.” The committee advanced the expansion 3–0 that morning. By November, APD reported the output to the same committee: eight operations, 93 people charged. Whatever the intent, 93 people charged is the result. In the same November meeting, his tribute to the retiring chief cited “an over 36% reduction in violent crime”; the actual annual figure, reported that January, was 24% (Their Claims vs The Record).
Zero oversight from the committee he chairs
Hess chairs the Public Safety Committee, the body where RTIC oversight is supposed to live. A review of all seven of its recorded meetings (May 2025–July 2026) found zero: no audits requested, no post-approval briefings received, and the July 29, 2026 meeting, held after the RTIC was operational-bound, contains not one word about RTIC implementation, the Flock wind-down, or the promised quarterly audits. The only skeptical questions ever raised in that committee came from Mosley (on ICE agreements) and Smith (on profiling and face-vs-plate), never from its chair. His committee next meets Sept 24, 11 AM. See Oversight Theater.
Why he matters now
His committee, Public Safety, meets the last Thursday of odd months at 11 AM, virtually (livestream), and is where RTIC implementation reporting will land. If the quarterly audits (see Promise Tracker, row 4) surface anywhere public, it’s there. He is also the natural council author for any move to convert his resolution’s language into an actual ordinance, a test of whether the civil-liberties framing was substance or cover. Residents who want that on the record should ask him directly: bohess@avlcouncil.com. See Speak at Council.
Last updated: Aug 17, 2026