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By Branda GorgiesPhotos by Creative Commons via Google Images
September 3, 2023 (El Cajon) – Cameras in public are being used in El Cajon successfully to capture criminals, from car thieves to suspects in violent crimes. But some have raised concerns about privacy. Along with concerned community members, some lawmakers and lawyers are claiming that the police department is illegally sharing private license plate data.
El Cajon is using 40 automatic license plate reading (ALPR) cameras by Flock Safety, an American company. The El Cajon City Council approved a one-year pilot program in March for the El Cajon Police Department. These cameras are said to recognize license plates and vehicle characteristics, but not faces or drivers.
On the first day of the program, the police department captured a stolen vehicle that was carjacked in Lemon Grove during a violent robbery. The same day, the police found a stolen vehicle from Imperial County and arrested the suspect in a gas station parking lot. More suspects have been apprehended since then in numerous additional crimes.
According to the El Cajon Police Department’s Flock Safety Transparency page, ECPD “uses Flock Safety technology to capture objective evidence without compromising on individual privacy. El Cajon PD utilizes retroactive searches to solve crimes after they've occurred. Additionally, El Cajon PD utilizes real-time alerting of hotlist vehicles to capture wanted criminals.”
According to the city’s Flock page, in the past 30 days, Flock cameras have detected 869,368 vehicles, of which 2,903 were on a hot list, resulting in 369 searches.
The cameras are intended to reduce property crimes, violent crimes, vehicular crimes and locate missing people. They will not be used for minor traffic incidents, parking violations or immigration purposes, according to a press release from the El Cajon Police Department.
In the case of privacy and data, the city has stated that none of the data collected is sold to third-party sources and that information is deleted automatically after 30 days unless found helpful in a criminal case. The city shares its data with other law enforcement agencies in California, but not other states, according to its Flock Safety website An officer would also need a justification to search through the database.
A 2015 law, Senate Bill 34, places many restrictions on ALPR cameras in California. Since the state of California has no power or authority over other states, some legal experts interpret the law to mean that no data can be shared with agencies or states outside of California.
The issue with Flock Safety’s ALPR cameras, according to a paper by Jay Stanley with the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), is that Flock essentially creates a centralized database of surveillance footage. This database would be available to every police department and community that uses Flock cameras. Stanley stated that this would mean “small-town police departments can suddenly afford to conduct surveillance at a massive scale.” Since the database is accessible to any community with a Flock Safety ALPR camera, it would technically mean that the license plate data is being shared beyond state lines. This, according to some lawyers and lawmakers, is illegal under SB-34.
The El Cajon Police Department doesn’t agree with this interpretation of the law. The department restated that the data collected by the cameras won’t be used to enforce immigration or anti-abortion policies, another issue that was brought up as some were concerned the license plate data can track who’s been to clinics that offer abortions.
So, how do the ALPR cameras help fight crime exactly? Well, the ALPR database sends officers alerts when a license plate associated with a stolen vehicle, criminal suspect or missing person is recognized. More than 1,500 communities nationwide used Flock Safety's ALPR cameras in 2022.A successful case of public cameras outside of El Cajon is the catching of a murder suspect in La Mesa. Surveillance video at a trolley station captured a man arguing with another man who was later found fatally stabbed. The La Mesa Police Department released the footage asking for tips. The man, Steven Calhoun, was later arrested and charged with murder. You can read more about the story here.
Outside of East County, San Diego has gone farther with public surveillance cameras. The San Diego City Council has not only approved the use of the ALPR cameras, but smart streetlights, too. San Diego is the first to implement both technologies. The controversy in San Diego not only involves privacy, but the San Diego Privacy Advisory Board not being given the chance to review the proposal beforehand.
Members of the community have stated this created a sense of mistrust between the city council and the citizens. Others were skeptical of the implementation of both technologies instead of just one. While some were critical, there were also supporters of the program who valued the safety the technologies offered. You can read more about the situation in an NBC San Diego report here.
Privacy Concerns from the Public
Some members of communities using ALPR cameras have voiced concerns that the use of them is an invasion of privacy. The ACLU specifically has given a guide on how to deter the use of ALPR technology in your local 
police department.
police department.Another argument from Jay Stanley’s paper is that the centralized database, if grown to a larger scale, could give law enforcement the ability to track virtually any vehicle’s movement. This could potentially worsen the effects of abuse by the government of law enforcement.
Stanley mentioned the company Verkada as an example of the possible downfalls of a database like Flock’s. Verkada has a similar cloud-based database for its security systems. In March of 2021, a group hacked into Verkada’s database and stole sensitive data from the company’s customers, including surveillance footage. You can learn more about the situation here.
The accuracy of these cameras was also brought into question. There are times when a license plate is misidentified or, since the hit lists are only updated twice a day, out-of-date alerts have been sent. This has led to police elsewhere harassing the wrong people and subjecting them to horrible treatment. Three notable cases have occurred in 2014, 2020 and 2021.
Lastly, there’s the issue of people simply being uncomfortable being filmed. Stanley explained that the cameras can provide information about a person’s private “political, financial, sexual, religious, or medical lives.” Since these cameras are put in so many places, they offer a thorough look at where a specific license plate number has shown up. Flock Safety also allows officers to filter through the database using license plate numbers and/or vehicle characteristics. This could mean that an officer could search for a specific person’s car and see a detailed history of its movements and locations. There is also the Hawthorne effect, which states that people change their behaviors when they know they’re being watched or observed. That may lead to the possibility of innocent people avoiding certain locations or events due to the fear of being watched. Although Stanley recognizes the policies Flock has exercised for privacy protection, he believes those are “necessary but not sufficient.”
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