Today’s newsletter is presented by Evinco.
Hello, La Mesa!
Let’s lead with some good news: Grossmont Union high schools will have librarians once again. To end a labor complaint, the governing board agreed that the nine campus librarians laid off last year can go back to their old posts in fall 2027 and those jobs will be safe from budget cuts for at least two years.
Plus it’s Halloween and the La Mesa Village is going all out! Are there small gremlins in your life? Take the two-legged kind trick-or-treating through dozens of small businesses. And if your gremlins are of the furry creature with four paws variety, there will be a costume contest. Halloween in La Mesa Village takes place from 3:30 to 6 p.m. on Saturday, Oct. 31.
Now to the meat of this newsletter. You’ve probably heard of Flock, the license-plate reading cameras that many law enforcement agencies in the country use because it can help find stolen vehicles, track fleeing suspects and all that. La Mesa has 20 Flock cameras at different intersections.
With all those different police departments signed up for the AI-powered cameras, many are plugged into a wide network where cops from different areas can look for a specific vehicle. La Mesa, with 60,000 residents, is part of that network, but the city of San Diego, with 1.4 million residents, is not. Instead, San Diego Police Department searched its own Flock cameras 114,692 times over a nine month period. But intersections in La Mesa had 3.13 million searches through its cameras in the same time period— and it wasn’t just the La Mesa Police Department searching for criminals.
Drivers in La Mesa are actually being searched every three to six seconds by cops from all over California. That can be great for a Riverside deputy searching for a stolen car that traveled south into San Diego County. But from a privacy standpoint, a lot of people take issue with having their movements surveilled so frequently. Especially when it’s not by the neighborhood police they have built a rapport with.
You can read Tessa Balc and Dorian Hargrove’s full investigation below.
Drew Sitton
La Mesa Courier newsletter host
La Mesa story spotlight
La Mesa license plate readers scan city intersections every few seconds, generating millions of hits
By Dorian Hargrove • Times of San Diego and Tessa Balc • Times of San Diego
La Mesa police automated license plate readers logged more than 3.13 million scans of license plates on the city’s 20 cameras during a seven-month span.
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