USE OF DIGITAL SURVEILLANCE TECH BY LOS GATOS POLICE QUESTIONED

Town considering signing up for $40K annual license plate reader program

Drew Penner, Reporter

The Los Gatos-Monte Sereno Police Department has promoted its network of the license plate readers it’s set up around town to monitor traffic and alert it to vehicles deemed suspicious, handing out awards to officers who’ve used the cameras to crack cases and highlighting it in Council reports.

But as the end of the two-year trial period nears for the devices from Atlanta-based Flock Safety, some police accountability researchers are questioning whether Los Gatos should re-up with the technology provider, given the privacy intrusions and security risks.

“License plate readers are mass surveillance technology,” said Dave Maass, director of investigations for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a civil liberties nonprofit. “They collect data on everyone.”

A California Public Records Act inquiry filed by the organization found the local police force is getting cues from 16 agencies about who to track with Flock’s Automated License Plate Recognition system when their vehicle shows up in Los Gatos.

In responding to the public records request, the department said it “does not share data through an automated process” with others.

“LG/MSPD’s fifteen cameras read and capture an image of approximately 450,000 unique license plates per month,” reads the response, which notes the images are deleted after 30 days unless one appears to be connected to a criminal activity.

The network “has proactively sent the department alerts for approximately 300 vehicles associated to crimes in 2022 and there is reason to believe approximately 100 crimes have been solved or specifically prevented in the first 11 months of 2022 as a result of the data generated by the Flock ALPR system.”

But Maass says, in the 30 days leading up to Nov. 9, in order to find just 23 vehicles that might have been involved in a crime, the dragnet had to photograph 458,411 plates.

“If you do the math on that, that means that only .005% of the vehicles were relevant to a crime,” he said. “That’s not even a 10th of a percent.”

In the meantime, the department has the ability to develop a comprehensive—though temporary—map of the lives of innocent local residents, according to Maass, noting this could be subject to a security breach.

“Think about how much you drive in 30 days,” he said. “That can be used to build a pretty detailed picture of your travel patterns.”

Flock’s privacy policy allows it to share the data it stores with government agencies in response to legal requests such as subpoenas or warrants.

In a recent report by the Guardian newspaper, Joshua Thomas, a Flock vice-president, was asked about how the company would handle abortion-related investigations in the wake of the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision that struck down the constitutional right to the procedure.

“Flock’s mission as a business is to eliminate crime,” he said. “Our position at Flock remains consistent in response to the Dobbs decision. Our perspective is that we do not enact laws, and our mission is not specific to any particular laws.”

Maass says even though the local department claims it doesn’t share license plate files with other jurisdictions,because Flock is based in Georgia—where abortion is illegal afteraround six weeks—there’s no reasonwhy law enforcers there couldn’t demandpolice here supply informationabout someone who’d visited Los Gatosseeking to end a pregnancy.

“They can hand over data if theywant to,” he said, adding Silicon Valleyleaders have been among the mostconcerned with the reach of surveillancetech. “Steve Jobs famously usedto drive a new car on a regular basis sohe could conceal his license plate.”

Rachel Richards, a police transparency researcher who says she’sbeen harassed by law enforcement inNew York—and who recently passed through the Los Gatos area herself—notes the technology is powerful and potentially harmful.

“It’s casting an extremely wide net,and it’s catching a lot of personal informationand data,” she said. “Willwe now start tracking people in stateswhere abortion is illegal?”

Recent court decisions in New York and Chicago have shone a light on howpolice inappropriately responded toBlack Lives Matter demonstrations and have begun to place limits on the unencumbereduse of spy tech, she adds.

“People were being surveilled withthe specific intent to silence them,”she said of how digital tools were usedagainst racial justice activists. “Theimplications of this technology are goingto manifest themselves in ways wecan’t even imagine.”

That’s why it’s so important to laydown ground rules before things go offthe rails, according to Richards.“The time to put those measures inplace is now,” she said.

“This is not apolice state. This is not an autocraticsociety—yet.”The way Los Gatos police officialsput it, its license plate surveillancehelped resolve around 100 cases, comparedto the approximately 2,000crime reports it receives each year—a20% rate.

However, this statistic includes whatPolice Chief Jamie Field considers oneof the greatest benefits of the system—that it not only can help solve crimes,but that it also scares people off whohave yet to break the law in Los Gatos.

She outlined her view, during a Jan.17 report to Council, in response to aquestion from Councilmember MatthewHudes about the usefulness ofthe technology.

“It really provides us with as mart-deployment pattern, because aswe are alerted to those vehicles coming into town that may be involved n some kind of criminal activity…it's able to alert, immediately, our dispatch center—and all of our deployed resources—to that area,” she said. “Wehave been able to prevent crime from occurring here, and I mention that because that's something that's very difficult to measure.”

Capt. Derek Moye echoed the sentiment,noting when Los Gatos learnsof suspects arriving on Los Gatos’doorstep, the idea is to give those “bad players” the feeling that, “‘Oh my gosh,Los Gatos has 20,000 cops,’” causingthem to turn around.

“I'm trying to figure out a way tomeasure how many times that happened,and all the crime we prevented,”he told Council. “Because when peoplehave these stolen vehicles, they're notout to joyride, they're out to commitcrimes—that's why they do it.”

Critics—like the American Civil LibertiesUnion—fear new high-tech tools will only end up exacerbating America’s entrenched problem with racial inequality, something highlighted in the data presented during the same report.

According to Field’s presentation, between July and December 2022, more than half (52%) of the people stopped by Los Gatos-Monte Sereno police—684—were white, while27%—358 people—were perceived tobe Hispanic or Latino.

That was followed by 155 people categorized as Asian (9%), 99 people perceived as Middle Eastern or South Asian(7% of stops), 58 Black people (4%), 9Pacific Islanders (1%), and 2 deemedNative Americans (less than 1%).

According to the U.S. Census, LosGatos is made up of 70.1% white people, suggesting these residents are beingstopped by local police at a disproportionately lower rate. As Hispanic or Latino people make up just 8.3% ofLos Gatos’ population, it appears these residents are experiencing forced interactions with police at a much higher rate than people of other backgrounds.

Meanwhile, with Asian residentsmaking up 16.8% of the town’s population,it seems this demographic groupis getting stopped disproportionatelyless frequently by law enforcement.

Of course, the local force patrols an area that extends beyond Los Gatos’ geographical boundaries, and community members don’t just include people who live here.

During the same period, 31% of stops in Los Gatos by police were of females(396), compared with the 50.9%of Los Gatans who identify as female;890 stops were of males (69%), followed by five of transgender males andtwo of transgender females.

Last June, the ACLU Foundation of Northern California announced it had settled its lawsuit against formerMarin County Sheriff Robert Doyle, after his office illegally shared license plate and location information—capturedby its network of surveillance cameras—to hundreds of federal andout-of-state agencies, including Immigrationand Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection.

One public commenter at Council inLos Gatos wondered why local officershave been stopping people from someracial groups at a much higher ratethan others.

“It appeared to me that the ratio wasabout 50/50 in terms of people of colorversus whites that were being pulledover,” said John Shepardson, a lawyerwho lives in Los Gatos. “I wanted toknow if there was any consideration ofwhy that was taking place. Because myunderstanding (is) that’s different thanthe demographic in town, although Irealize that we have a number of peoplethat drive through the town thatdon’t live here, but maybe work here.”

However, Shepardson said he supportsthe Flock program.

“I was encouraged by that,” he said.“An idea that I thought of, that if theTown goes forward with that, thatit might actually even sort of advertise—that this is a ‘Flock surveillance community’ and put that message outas a further deterrent.”

Hudes asked Field if the speakerhad been interpreting the race datac orrectly.

“While it may not be exact what ourdemographics are in town, we also recognizethat we have a lot of folks thatcome to the community to work, tovisit, and for many other purposes aswell,” Field said, noting the informationis based on officers’ perceptions. “Butthere’s no further evaluation at this time.”

Council member Rob Rennie asked about the $40,000 per year price tag to sign up with Flock, following thetrial period.Field said the first couple years of service were paid for by the State’sSupplemental Law Enforcement ServicesFund.

“That was something that was goingt o have to be evaluated this year shouldFlock be a piece of technology wewould like to continue forward with,”she said. “Then we would have to buildthat into the budget for fiscal 23-24.”