Through the urban grapevine: How an SF scanner chaser got his followers

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Days before the opening of the highly-anticipated IKEA store on San Francisco’s Market Street, a security alarm went off and workers called the police. 

Officers arrived, scanned the area, spoke with employees and headed back to their cars. It was a false alarm. But that is not what immediately went out online. 

As the officers turned to leave, a 35-year-old civilian who heard the report on the police scanner rolled up on his bicycle. “What was the call for?” he asked, filming from a handlebar-mounted camera. 

“Oh, just an alarm went off,” an officer responded. 

Later, back at home, the cyclist — who goes by the username FriscoLive415 online — edited his footage of the exchange and posted it on X. 

“SFPD responded to report of a robbery at @IKEA’s newest store in Downtown San Francisco … and the store is not even officially open yet!” he wrote. 

The post got some 5,500 views, as one of many crime-related posts made by @FriscoLive415, who first joined the social media site in April.

Left unsaid that day, however, was that he knew no such robbery had occurred. When asked about it, he wavered between calling it a “misread” on his own part and an initial distrust of the officer’s report on the scene. No matter. He maintains that his click-bait tweet, while possibly misleading, was technically not inaccurate — police had responded to a report of a robbery. 

Moreover, the man behind FriscoLive415 Twitter account says that his goal is to get more eyes on his videos. To that end, he has made the streets of San Francisco his business, primarily its police lights and sirens, arrests and chases.

“People love pursuits,” said the owner of the account, who declined to be identified but spoke to Mission Local about his recent following. “They wanna see the police doing something.” 

FriscoLive415 refers to his posts as “a new style of news,” and said he started out emulating shows like “Cops” or “On Patrol: Live,” where camera crews follow police officers. 

But experts cautioned that posting unverified news, as FriscoLive415 also does by sharing police dispatch reports, spreads misinformation. 

“The danger of just jumping in,” said longtime San Francisco Chronicle reporter and journalism lecturer Kevin Fagan, “is that, as well intentioned as you can be, it’s easy to misinterpret things, or take strong statements from someone or some agency, and run with that without backstopping it.” 

Carl Nolte, a Chronicle columnist who has written for the paper since 1961, called it “kinda scary,” and said “it goes back to the earlier days of journalism.” 

Nolte pointed to advocacy journalism at the turn of the 20th century, which often lacked fact-checking and was riddled with unverified reports pushing a particular viewpoint. He compared that practice with today’s popular X accounts and postings on Nextdoor or YouTube. 

“When people have their axes to grind, people use unverified rumors,” Nolte said. 

Perhaps FriscoLive415 is more akin to other man-on-the-street types in San Francisco, like Stanley Roberts, a former cameraman for KRON4 who developed the wildly popular feature “People Behaving Badly;” JJ Smith, another anonymous videographer who films or interviews those using drugs or living on the streets; and deli shop owner Adam Mesnick, who is known by his online moniker, bettersoma — a controversial account that frequently posts videos of drug-addicted, sometimes unconscious people in SoMa. 

“I am proud to be part of a unique coalition of passionate SF citizens that desire to share the unvarnished truth of what is happening on the #streetsofsanfrancisco,” FriscoLive415 posted on July 19, “for better or worse.” 

And, no doubt, he would like their X followers — eventually, FriscoLive415 wants to figure out how to monetize his content. While he has nearly 5,000 followers after only six months, JJ Smith has more than 18,600 since he began in 2019, and Mesnick, as bettersoma, has 21,600 since he joined in 2016. 

Emilie Raguso, an acclaimed journalist who founded The Berkeley Scanner in September 2022, posts mostly crime stories — as well as occasional unverified dispatch reports — to her nearly 8,000 X followers. (After sharing a dispatch report, however, Raguso said she always verifies incidents and follows up.)

First on the scene

It’s unclear what axe FriscoLive415 has to grind. 

The 35-year-old behind the camera, a former tech and government worker who is between jobs, listens to several police scanners from across the Bay Area simultaneously from his apartment. 

Before starting FriscoLive415, the account’s owner interned at City Hall, and said he worked in the public works and emergency management departments. He left government for tech, he says, after noticing a complacent “rinse and repeat” pattern of city workers uninterested in improving the status quo. 

Now, with plenty of time on his hands, he is sometimes among the first on the scene.

When a woman was hit by a driver and then dragged on a SoMa street by a self-driving Cruise car this month, FriscoLive415’s early footage at the scene was broadcast by major television news outlets. (This incident led the Department of Motor Vehicles’ decision Tuesday to ban self-driving Cruise cars from San Francisco streets.)

For FriscoLive415, the chase is a part of the draw: He loves pursuits. When he can, he bikes quickly from his Tenderloin apartment to the scene immediately after hearing about an incident on the police scanner. 

“It’s a fun time,” he says, grinning as he shares details from recent incidents. “I’m on the edge of my seat.” 

When a helicopter flies overhead, he gazes up at it to check who is flying. Flightradar, he says, is his favorite website. 

He tries to avoid offering commentary, and instead lets the footage speak for itself. Sometimes, however, he “can’t help himself” and opines, including offering critiques of the police. 

“To my friends @SFPD, I have a plan to help you boost your numbers, legitimately. It’s called OPEN YOUR DANG EYES,” he wrote in August, alongside an image of a sidewalk market from a surveillance camera. “Either that, or relinquish your control over this operation to the Feds.” 

Citizen journalism and its risks

JJ Smith, Mesnick and other citizen journalists push tough-on-crime policies, and frequently post depictions of poverty, crisis and squalor in San Francisco. FriscoLive415, for his part, said that he does not agree with many of the popular right-wing Twitter accounts that have begun sharing his content to “further their narrative,” but he believes people can choose how to interpret it. 

Often, however, accounts like FriscoLive415’s also falsely amplify the public perception of chaos on San Francisco’s streets. 

Last month, for instance, FriscoLive415 tweeted about a situation he heard on the police radio that was “popping off” at the San Francisco Zoo: “It came in initially as a person throwing things at the animals, and has quickly escalated to a armed person with a gun who looks like a Muslim Female with a headscarf,” he wrote. “Wtf is going on over there?” 

Nearly 10,000 people saw the post, according to X. Erica Sandberg, an outspoken finance writer and San Francisco commentator, lamented in response: “I adore you but sometimes I have to turn away because your posts are so upsetting.” 

But about 20 minutes later, FriscoLive415 posted an update that there was no gun, and the 911 caller was “mentally disturbed.” It is unclear whether the alleged Muslim woman ever existed. Only 1,500 Twitter users saw the follow-up post. 

Dispatch audio, in fact, is often less than 100 percent accurate. 

“There are limits to the information that [911] callers are able, or sometimes willing, to provide,” said Jackie Thornhill, a spokesperson for the Department of Emergency Management. 

Dispatch depends on “imperfect information,” she said, and those fielding reports from uncertain callers — who think they maybe saw a gun, for example — will err on the side of caution, and prioritize calls based on that possibility.  

FriscoLive415 acknowledged the risk of proliferating unsubstantiated or even disproven information. 

In a recent tweet that got 221,000 views on X, he broadcast a fentanyl “exposure” at a construction site, saying “multiple construction workers” were allegedly exposed to the deadly drug. But it was another false alarm, one rooted in an incorrect understanding of how fentanyl is ingested. 

“I was not clued in, as I am now, on the ‘scientific basis’ of ‘fentanyl exposure,’” he said afterward, calling the tweet one of those that “blew up in [his] face” with critics. 

But, since the scanner information is technically public and he is simply spreading it, he said, he’s “comfortable” in his output — true or not.