There are serious problems with ALPR systems
Santa Cruz recently demonstrated why automated license plate reader (ALPR) systems deserve far more scrutiny than they often receive. On January 13, the Santa Cruz City Council voted 6–1 to terminate its contract with Flock Safety after discovering that license plate data collected locally had been accessed by out-of-state law enforcement agencies.
According to city officials and reporting by KQED, the access resulted from a flaw in Flock’s system architecture that allowed agencies outside California to conduct broad searches of ALPR data. Those searches violated both the California ALPR Privacy Act (SB 34) and the California Values Act (SB 54).
This concern is not unique to Santa Cruz. In Kalamazoo, Michigan, residents and local organizers have raised similar alarms about Flock cameras capturing residents’ movements and the potential for access by outside agencies, including ICE. Despite claims of crime-fighting benefits, questions about data control and misuse remain unresolved.
Mayor Fred Keeley explained why Santa Cruz walked away: the threat to civil liberties outweighed any benefit from a system requiring constant fixes to address newly discovered vulnerabilities. Santa Cruz acted because the risks were real and documented. Other cities using the same vendor should take notice before assuming these systems are secure or lawful.
Lori Chaykin
via email
Clapping-back after Dan Snyder’s comment on North 40
The decision was not whether to do the so-called “long term planning” vs “minimalism”—if you were paying attention. The “long term planning” that Maria Ristow and Rob Rennie approved, and Rob Moore agreed with, had no deadline and no penalties.
It is the Council that runs the Town, and a majority of Council can run the Council. These three Council members missed the end-of-January 2023 deadline by 1.5 years, allowing nearly 20 Builder’s Remedy’s to eventually be filed. Currently about half of those are still in the queue, with the largest yet to be finalized. Most of these are 6-13 stories tall.
All of the Bay Area cities that we could poll chose to finish the Housing Element first. Presumably, they recognized that there was a deadline with penalties that could be massive. Our three Council people chose to ignore that and focused on the “long term planning” which had no penalties. Two of those people are running again for office this November.
Jak VanNada
Los Gatos Community Alliance
*Letters are edited for length and clarity
