Unincorporated areas within San Diego County may be getting dozens of new automated license plate reader cameras.
The San Diego Sheriff’s Office announced the plan on Tuesday, with a presentation to the county Board of Supervisors outlining the proposal.
The cameras would be installed in Alpine, Borrego Springs, Campo, Fallbrook, Julian, Lakeside, Ramona, Rancho San Diego, Rancho Santa Fe, 4S Ranch, Spring Valley, Valley Center, and other communities.
“ALPR cameras serve as a valuable investigative tool for law enforcement agencies, acting as a force-multiplier in crime prevention and public safety efforts,” said a statement from the sheriff’s office.
“This expansion is part of the Sheriff’s ongoing commitment to enhancing public safety with cutting-edge technology.”
The tech has already been installed in five contract cities — Del Mar, Encinitas, San Marcos, Solana Beach, and Poway — which law enforcement says have solved crimes that include homicides, kidnappings, vehicle theft, and burglaries and assaults.
The cameras capture images of license plates and automatically compare them against law enforcement databases. The sheriff’s department said that helps them identify stolen vehicles, track suspects, locate missing persons, and assist with criminal investigations.
However, critics say that adopting the cameras en masse raises significant privacy concerns, and that the technology is invasive, used to normalize mass surveillance, and can be easily misused.
The technology is “eroding our civil liberties and our privacy,” Saira Hussain, senior staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told KQED in June.
“When you have a network of hundreds of cameras around a densely populated city, you’re going to inevitably start to understand patterns of how somebody’s moving about and being able to track their movements at a very granular level,” Hussain said.
“It starts to look like a mass surveillance technology that is basically a dragnet, and it is identifying everybody who is driving around — not the very, very small percentage of people who may be engaged in criminal activity.”
The sheriff’s office said that they have listened to and acted on the public’s concerns about privacy and enacted strict protocols on the storage, access, and use of the data that they are gathering.
“This includes limiting the retention of information to relevant criminal investigations, adhering to local and federal privacy regulations and ensuring transparency with the public on how ALPR technology is used,” the statement said, adding that they follow strict established policies and conduct annual privacy audits.
More information about the program can be found here.
