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What's going on in Sunnyvale?

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The big news on local TV today is the "59% rise in violent crime" in Sunnyvale. That caught my attention, because a) it sounds like another bogus use of statistics and b) as we've seen in Los Altos next door, crime has been generally low and not shooting up. The news report alluded to "California DOJ" data, but failed to actually point to it. Have no fear, gentle reader, for we have trod where KTVU fears to go: straight to the data. The DOJ does, in fact, provide this data, although it takes a little work to get to. You can download it here, if you are interested: https://openjustice.doj.ca.gov/exploration/crime-statistics   Next you have to filter that down to only show Sunnyvale. Excel, Google Sheets, and LibreOffice all have a way of doing that, using "filters." Once you set them up, you get a little pull-down menu for each column, and you can select only the values you want. That's what I did, for each of the 5 cities shown below. Then I plott...
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ALPR data being shared with anti-abortion states

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Despite guidance from California Attorney General Rob Bonta, quite a few California police departments are sharing automated license plate reader (ALPR) data with out-of-state law enforcement agencies. ALPR systems, like the one that Los Altos is installing from Flock Safety, take pictures of every car going by, digitize their license plate, and record their presence. Police say this helps identify stolen vehicles, which are often used in crimes -- in principle, this should reduce crime, although the evidence that it actually works is very thin. This is a problem if someone from an abortion-restricted state travels to California for reproductive health care. By law , (AB 1242) police in California cannot assist out-of-state law enforcement in prosecuting people for coming here for an abortion. And by law (SB 34) California police cannot share any ALPR data with out-of-state agencies, according to our AG.  And  yet 71 police agencies did just that, and dozens still do. Many ...
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Flock Safety appears to be getting careless

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 Last year the Los Altos City Council approved the installation of automated license plate readers (ALPRs) from a company called Flock Safety. While the efficacy of ALPRs as a crime-fighting tool has proven very difficult to see (for example,  this  and this show little statistical evidence for improvement), a new problem has come to light: It seems that Flock tends to be pretty casual about the rules. Two articles came out recently that call Flock's carefulness into question.  First, a Forbes article  (more reporting here ) found that Flock frequently put up cameras without regard to permitting or traffic safety considerations. "[I]n its rush to install surveillance cameras in the absence of clear regulatory frameworks, Flock repeatedly broke the law in at least five states. In two, state agencies have banned Flock staff from installing new cameras," Forbes correspondents Thomas Brewster and Cyrus Farivar report. Apparently, in the Silicon Valley tradition of ...
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