Another San Diego County city is expanding its use of license plate reader technology.
This week, the Chula Vista City Council voted unanimously to purchase a powerful system of 150 license plate readers from Flock Safety, a controversial surveillance company that has been expanding to hundreds of cities across the country.
License plate reader technology is already widely used in a number of San Diego area cities. But Flock’s systems have drawn specific scrutiny because the company is expanding so quickly — and because it gathers much of that data into a central database.
Earlier this year, the city of El Cajon installed its own network of Flock plate readers. La Mesa was also set to vote on a possible contract with Flock last week but postponed that discussion.
License plate readers, also known as Automated License Plate Recognition (ALPR) technology, work by taking a picture of every plate that comes into view and using optical character recognition to read the plate number. Some plate readers can be mounted to cars, while others are installed on streetlights.
That allows local police departments to check license plates against their own lists of stolen cars and state or national databases. Police say these systems are valuable crime-fighting tools, giving them a better chance at catching thieves and recovering stolen vehicles.
But privacy advocates argue that plate reader systems built by Flock and other companies track the locations of people’s cars unnecessarily and store that information for weeks.
A number of other San Diego County cities, including Coronado, Carlsbad and Escondido, have been accused of violating state law by sharing their plate reader data with law enforcement agencies outside of California.
A better approach, the American Civil Liberties Union says, would be to check plate numbers against watchlists, then swiftly erase that data if the system doesn’t find a match.
Tuesday’s discussion over whether to purchase the Flock system in Chula Vista lasted over two hours and drew more than 150 online comments.
The Chula Vista Police Department has faced sharp criticism for sharing license plate data with Immigration and Customs Enforcement — a record that privacy advocates pointed out at the meeting.
“I’m here to ask you to reject this proposal,” said American Friends Services Committee Director Pedro Rios, who served as a member of a city task force on technology and privacy. “Vulnerable communities are indeed impacted when there is negligence about the misuse of surveillance technology.”
Still, many residents, including Chula Vista police officers, voiced their strong support for the technology on Tuesday.
“Without hesitation, I’ll tell anybody who will listen,” said David Oyos, the president of Chula Vista’s Police Officers Association. “We’re going to use this technology to catch the criminals who prey on the victims in our city.”
The police department has proposed installing most of the cameras on the city’s westside, which could disproportionately target residents of more underserved neighborhoods.
