ALPR data being shared with anti-abortion states

-

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 of them have "dug in" and are refusing to abide by the AG's interpretation of the law.

As part of our Los Altos installation, City Council worked closely with the Los Altos Police Department to put in place policies to prevent abuse. That's great as far as it goes, but this situation demonstrates what we were worried about: policies are only words on a page. Once a technological capability is in place, we have to rely on perhaps unwilling participants to maintain our civil liberties. That's a tenuous place to be.

And those are only the voluntary compliance issues. It's unclear what would happen if a Florida police department were to subpoena Los Altos' ALPR data. It's even more unclear if the Florida police department went straight to Flock, and subpoenaed the information from their servers. In the very likely event that Flock complied, all of our policies and laws would be useless.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

What's going on in Sunnyvale?

-
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...
Read more

RIPA Update for Los Altos

-
Image
 The helpful folks at the city recently provided me with the RIPA data through August, so it's a good time to check in on the State of Los Altos Policing for the first half of the year. It's been a fairly quiet summer on the police policy front, with a few high-visibility arrests using ALPRs, and discussion going on about purchasing drones for the police. Here's what we are seeing on the data front -- after all, this is a data blog! RIPA Stops As you all know by now, every police department in California is required to collect data on every single stop that they make. This data, suitably anonymized, is then public. You can get this by submitting a public records request to the City; I've also put it in the github repo, along with all the analysis code, if you'd like to look at it yourself. Here are the stops per month since Los Altos started collecting RIPA data. As you can see, the vast majority of stops are for traffic violations. There are lots of ways you might ...
Read more

Is there bias in our policing?

-
Image
 It was the summer of George Floyd that really shook my confidence in the police. Like most white kids, I was raised on the image of the friendly policeman -- if you ever have trouble, find a policeman (they were always men back then) and he will help you. But as more and more stories emerged... as more and more departments were revealed to have covered up, condoned, and even rewarded the most grotesque racism... and as I really listened to people of color talking about their own experiences, my childhood image was shaken. I respect all of those lived experiences. They are real and true. At the same time, the thing that I can offer to help is data analysis. That's not a very splashy gift; sorry about that. But it's what I have, so it's what I bring. One thing about data analysis is that you really can't do it in a vacuum, without context. It's not a machine, where you pour numbers in at the top and get crisp and unambiguous answers out the bottom. You have to know t...
Read more