Simran PatelOver the last three months, a group has been discovered deploying cameras on undisclosed street corners of Santa Ana in an operation meant to document the comings and goings of Santa Ana citizens.
The group in question? The Santa Ana Police Department.
These cameras aren’t regular street cameras; they are AI-powered cameras known as Automatic License Plate Readers capable of recording, analyzing and uploading information in less than a second. Santa Ana’s ALPRs are contracted through surveillance tech company Flock, but they plan to roll out Motorola brand cameras in the near future.
Citizens of Santa Ana deserve the right to not live in a surveillance state, having their every move recorded and uploaded into a database. Has Santa Ana forgotten about its citizens’ 4th Amendment rights to privacy?
You don’t even have to go more than halfway through the Bill of Rights to find it.
ALPR information is uploaded to an online database used by thousands of agencies across California that do the same. This database was found to be illegally tracking Californians’ daily lives.
Don’t let the name fool you, ALPRs do more than just read license plates. They record video, then use AI technology to gather information about your car, including the make, model, color, plate and other identifying information that can’t be obtained from a traditional license plate scanner. The information accumulated is then uploaded along with a video feed to a searchable cloud database accessible to law enforcement across California, and potentially, the federal government.
Don’t have a car? You can still be tracked. Flock brand ALPRs can identify bikes, pedestrians and even animals.
These databases constitute a gross violation of the 4th amendment, which isn’t just my opinion, but the ruling of the Supreme Court in their 2012 case, United States v. Jones.
In this case, the court ruled, for most offenses, law enforcement’s use of warrantless GPS monitoring violates people’s expectations of privacy:
“For such offenses, society’s expectation has been that law enforcement agents and others would not—and indeed, in the main, simply could not—secretly monitor and catalogue every single movement of an individual’s car for a very long period,” said Justice Alito in his concurrence with the ruling.
ALPR supporters argue the cameras’ crime-stopping benefits outweigh any potential privacy violations, claiming that there’s no need to worry about federal surveillance, since California law prevents state agencies from sharing this data with the federal government.
California law indeed prevents ALPR data from being shared with any federal agency; however, 71 counties were found violating that law, including Orange County. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. Fool me 71 times, shame on the Santa Ana City Council.
Additionally, ALPRs are not very effective at stopping crime. SAPD data shows that in a single week, around 1.9 million people were scanned. Only 0.000018% of scans indicated a match. You’re more likely to find a 4-leaf-clover, get struck by lightning, or have Shaq make 20 free throws in a row than SAPD is to find someone using ALPRs. And even then, a match doesn’t even indicate a crime was committed; it’s only used to aid current local investigations.
A Cal Matters investigation revealed that 10 Southern California law enforcement agencies in charge of ALPR data dispersed the information to Immigration Customs Enforcement illegally. Although Santa Ana didn’t have ALPR cameras at the time, ICE officials have been spotted in the city as early as last week. We can’t trust that the SAPD won’t join the list.
If you drove down Main Street and 17th Street in the last three months, your information is a part of this database. And the worst part? The Santa Ana City Council not only knows about this, they voted to make it happen.
In May, the Santa Ana City Council passed an agreement implementing ALPRs through the companies Flock and Motorola Solutions, who have drawn accusations of mass surveillance from political rights groups like the American Civil Liberties Union and the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
Reports from these organizations show how law enforcement can use the data to reconstruct the daily routines of anyone driving by using an ALPR. Anyone going about their day in Santa Ana can be tracked without any sort of probable cause, since searches through this database don’t require warrants.
Santa Ana citizens can’t trust a system that has continuously failed to protect their right to privacy, violated the 4th Amendment and sold data to ICE all for a tool that is useful 0.000018% of the time.
ALPRs in Santa Ana need to go. Protest. Tell your neighbors. Make public records requests demanding to know where ALPRs are located (website deflock.me tracks ALPR locations across the country). Take pictures of the cameras and let your city council know you took those pictures. Watch the watchers.
Make sure that our government officials know that Santa Ana will not tolerate mass surveillance.
