As San Diego struggled this year to close a budget gap, critics lobbied to turn off the readers, which run $2 million a year.\u00a0In June, the City Council agreed to make the funding contingent on its review of the technology.<\/p>\n
![\"Councilmember](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/1765632427_504_SUT-L-PLATE-READERS-Print-5.jpg\")
Councilmember Henry Foster III speaks during a press conference regarding the use of automated license plate readers on Thursday in San Diego. (Ana Ramirez \/ The San Diego Union-Tribune)<\/p>\n
Several dozen people \u2014 including two council members \u2014 gathered in front of City Hall last week to rally against the license plate readers. \u201cIn San Diego, our residents expect safety, but they also expect their city to protect their right to privacy,\u201d Councilmember Henry Foster III said at the rally.<\/p>\n
The reauthorization of the technology is part of an ordinance San Diego created in 2023 to govern the use of all surveillance the city uses, looking at it through a civil rights lens. The review must be done annually.<\/p>\n
That same year, the council voted 6-3 to approve the license plate readers. This is the first time the readers are up for review.<\/p>\n
When the city created the surveillance ordinance, it also created the Privacy Advisory Board to review all surveillance technology.<\/p>\n
A memo in the City Council agenda packet indicates the board recommended last month ceasing use of the readers unless the department takes several steps, including improving its annual report to increase transparency.<\/p>\n
The board wants, for example, written attestation from Flock, the company that provides the technology, that it is complying with San Diego\u2019s policies. It also wants Flock to attest that it has not shared the data and that there have been no data breaches, and asked for routine third-party risk management audits and a comprehensive summary of community complaints.<\/p>\n
In a separate memo, the board recommended approving the policy governing the use of the plate readers, contingent on a few changes. As of now, the data is kept and accessible for 30 days. The board wanted to make the data inaccessible after 24 hours unless a court issued a warrant to access it. And at 14 days, they suggested, the data should be deleted. Police rejected both suggestions \u2014 14 days is not long enough for investigations, and requiring a warrant cannot be imposed at a local level, officials said.<\/p>\n
The two memos are saying essentially the same thing, two sides of the same coin, advisory board chair Tim Blood said. \u201cThe board wanted to send a message saying, \u2018Look, you should not use these things without implementing the recommendations.\u201d<\/p>\n
Although police rejected the two suggestions regarding warrants and access, they did agree to accept or consider the other 37 recommendations from the board.<\/p>\n
Last month, the city\u2019s Public Safety Committee reviewed the 54 surveillance technologies, including the plate readers, and unanimously recommended that the City Council approve their continued use.<\/p>\n
\u201cI have to balance the notion that we need to keep people safe from these horrific crimes and that these tools are helping against the theoretical threat of the federal government possibly violating the law and coming and taking these cameras,\u201d Councilmember Marni von Wilpert said at the meeting.<\/p>\n
Seth Hall is with the TRUST San Diego Coalition, which helped craft the city\u2019s surveillance ordinances, and he wants the plate readers gone.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey are telling us, no, just wait. Wait for more bad things to happen, and then maybe we\u2019ll think about shutting Flock down. But we will not wait,\u201d he said at last week\u2019s rally. \u201cFlock\u2019s unsafe technology is in San Diego\u2019s neighborhoods today, eroding trust today, we need to restore trust in our city.\u201d<\/p>\n
Barrio Logan resident Tonantzin \u201cCina\u201d S\u00e1nchez noted there are 12 plate readers around Chicano Park and said she fears Black and Latino communities are being targeted. \u201cWe\u2019re already the most underserved communities, but you can put millions of dollars into these cameras to over-police us,\u201d she said. \u201cIt\u2019s all eyes on us.\u201d<\/p>\n
State law permits law enforcement agencies to search each other\u2019s databases. But San Diego\u2019s strict surveillance ordinance makes the city an island \u2014 no outside agencies can directly access its data. Any California law enforcement agency that wants San Diego\u2019s data must show it is investigating one of a limited number of types of crimes. And no one outside of California can, including federal agencies.<\/p>\n
San Diego police officials said they are conducting weekly audits of the license plate reader use to ensure compliance with state laws, local ordinances and department policy. The audit also verifies that data is accessed for legitimate use.<\/p>\n
The department disclosed earlier this year that for the first nearly three weeks that it used the license plate reader system in late 2023 and early 2024, its data was unknowingly available for other California agencies to search \u2014 and nearly 13,000 such searches happened. On discovery of that, the switch was toggled off.<\/p>\n
Police also said it had intentionally shared data nearly 50 times with federal agencies last year, including the FBI, Homeland Security Investigations, Customs and Border Protection, the Secret Service and the Drug Enforcement Administration, but said none of the cases were related to immigration. Police said they have ended that practice to come into full compliance with state law barring data sharing with out-of-state or federal agencies.<\/p>\n
Flock Chief Legal Officer Dan Haley said last week the company understands that \u201cwe\u2019re in a particular political moment right now in this country where people have legitimate good faith concerns around surveillance.\u201d However, he said those who oppose the technology could actually benefit from it.<\/p>\n
That, Haley said, is because every time the Flock system is searched, a permanent record is created. \u201cIn the rare case where that technology is misused, the evidence of that misuse is right there in the platform, and that is by design,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
He also said there is no \u201cmassive permanent database\u201d and noted that the default setting is to delete data after 30 days, although agencies can opt to keep their data longer.<\/p>\n
\u201cA lot of the concern about Flock is generated by hypotheticals,\u201d Haley said.<\/p>\n
Because California prohibits sharing such data with federal and out-of-state agencies, he said Flock in March carved California out of its nationwide lookup service that allows agencies to share data.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Two years after a split San Diego City Council agreed to install 500 automated license plate recognition cameras…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":87126,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[138,23,1524,100,13,74,76,75],"class_list":{"0":"post-93303","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-san-diego","8":"tag-crime-and-public-safety","9":"tag-local-news","10":"tag-nation","11":"tag-news","12":"tag-politics","13":"tag-san-diego","14":"tag-san-diego-headlines","15":"tag-san-diego-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/93303","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=93303"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/93303\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/87126"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=93303"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=93303"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=93303"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}