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Thanks to Christopher Neely for his article on mass surveillance ALPR (automatic license plate recognition) cameras currently in place and being proposed in larger numbers for both Santa Cruz and Watsonville. Neely writes of recent “media reports of law enforcement agencies in California — not in Santa Cruz County — sharing data collected by the cameras with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and Immigration & Customs Enforcement.”
Because local police share data with law enforcement agencies like Riverside – which has shared data with ICE – (and many hundreds of others), we do not actually know if our local data has been shared with federal agencies. All it takes for another police or sheriff’s agency to obtain access to local data is a one-time request related to one “case” (no warrant needed), and thereafter, they retain unlimited search access.
Essentially, Flock Safety data is outside of local and even state control, and stored with few protective measures by the Flock company in Georgia, which, as mentioned in Neely’s article, has allowed Customs and Border Protection officers backdoor access to the data, as well as out-of-state sharing in violation of clear California laws. This data is not secure, nor under our local control in any meaningful way.
Ami Chen Mills
Santa Cruz