This summer the Los Angeles Police Department, hardly a civil liberties beacon, opted not to renew its three-year contract with Flock Safety automated license plate readers. The LAPD ditched the renewal amid public concerns over undue surveillance and potential ICE complicity, and amid police concerns over high error rates on cars that Flock wrongly marked as stolen. After all, a scanning mismatch — reading a wrong license plate character — could lead police to stop and interrogate an innocent driver at gun point.
In addition to Los Angeles, other California cities — El Cerrito, Santa Cruz, Oxnard, Bishop, Richmond, and Eureka — have cancelled or not renewed contracts with Flock. DeFlock maps are popping up on the Internet with hourly updates on new camera installations, and a “Have I been flocked” portal invites us to enter our license plate number to see if we, too, are under suspicion.
Santa Barbara needs to join the DeFlock club. Our City Council should scrap the pole-mounted cameras.
Democratic Socialists of America–Santa Barbara, along with other community activists, have called on the city to end its love affair with Flock. The City of Santa Barbara has 12 Automatic License Plate Recognition (ALPR) cameras — some at public parking structures, others near freeways, five on the Latino Westside — that have logged over 323,680 license plate readings in the last 30 days. (see map of Flock Safety cameras in Santa Barbara on DeFlock.me). That’s a lot of tracking, not just of Santa Barbara drivers, but of anyone driving through our city to reach agricultural fields, construction sites, or car washes where federal agents lie in wait.
The FLOCK surveillance cameras scan the license plate number of each vehicle passing through, and documents the date, time, and location so local law enforcement can search the data. ICE then asks local police throughout the country to access the data.
Although the S.B. Police Department assures us the data collected through ALPRs is not shared with Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and its private contractors, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) asserts that “Flock’s default agreement with police departments gives the company the right to share data with federal and local agencies for ‘investigative purposes’ even if a local department chooses to restrict data to its own officers.”
The Santa Barbara Police Department ALPR City Policy 2024 update (scroll to the end of the link) reads: “The City shall provide ALPR data to a federal, state, or local law enforcement agency for use in criminal investigations or to respond to public safety incidents upon receipt of a request that contains a case or incident number. In addition, information gathered shall not be disclosed to the public or in a civil matter unless such disclosure is required by law or court order.”
So even though the SBPD prohibits use of the data for ICE and CPB, the policy suggests such information is readily available to the agencies; all that is needed is a simple request absent a warrant. Moreover, the prohibition against public disclosure means we have no idea if the data is shared now or will be in the future with DHS.
Outsourcing policing to a third party comes with great risk — one not worth taking during this era when masked and armed gangs kill, abduct, and detain with impunity.
Get the FLOCK out of here.
Marcy Winograd is co-chair of the Central Coast Antiwar Coalition and member of Democratic Socialists of America-Santa Barbara.
