Two years after a split San Diego City Council agreed to install 500 automated license plate recognition cameras throughout town, the technology is up for review — and it’s still controversial.
On Tuesday, the council is slated to look at the plate readers as part of a review of 54 surveillance technologies that police use, which also includes cameras officers wear on their uniforms and SWAT robots and tactical equipment.
San Diego police hail the readers as a force multiplier that helps solve crimes. In 2024, San Diego had 36 homicides in San Diego. Information gleaned from the license plate readers aided in nearly a third of the investigations and helped lead to six apprehensions, police said. Without the technology, a spokesperson said, four of those cases would not have been solved.
Police also note that since the system was launched, they have recovered $6 million in stolen property, including more than 400 vehicles.
Critics argue that the automated license plate readers create a mass surveillance network and intrude on civil rights. And as communities reel from the Trump administration’s immigration crackdowns, many fear the federal government could muscle access to local surveillance systems despite laws barring such. An Associated Press investigation published last month said the U.S. Border Patrol is using a license plate reader program that flags vehicles deemed suspicious based on travel routes and locations.
As San Diego struggled this year to close a budget gap, critics lobbied to turn off the readers, which run $2 million a year. In June, the City Council agreed to make the funding contingent on its review of the technology.
Councilmember Henry Foster III speaks during a press conference regarding the use of automated license plate readers on Thursday in San Diego. (Ana Ramirez / The San Diego Union-Tribune)
Several dozen people — including two council members — gathered in front of City Hall last week to rally against the license plate readers. “In San Diego, our residents expect safety, but they also expect their city to protect their right to privacy,” Councilmember Henry Foster III said at the rally.
The reauthorization of the technology is part of an ordinance San Diego created in 2023 to govern the use of all surveillance the city uses, looking at it through a civil rights lens. The review must be done annually.
That same year, the council voted 6-3 to approve the license plate readers. This is the first time the readers are up for review.
When the city created the surveillance ordinance, it also created the Privacy Advisory Board to review all surveillance technology.
A memo in the City Council agenda packet indicates the board recommended last month ceasing use of the readers unless the department takes several steps, including improving its annual report to increase transparency.
The board wants, for example, written attestation from Flock, the company that provides the technology, that it is complying with San Diego’s policies. It also wants Flock to attest that it has not shared the data and that there have been no data breaches, and asked for routine third-party risk management audits and a comprehensive summary of community complaints.
In a separate memo, the board recommended approving the policy governing the use of the plate readers, contingent on a few changes. As of now, the data is kept and accessible for 30 days. The board wanted to make the data inaccessible after 24 hours unless a court issued a warrant to access it. And at 14 days, they suggested, the data should be deleted. Police rejected both suggestions — 14 days is not long enough for investigations, and requiring a warrant cannot be imposed at a local level, officials said.
The two memos are saying essentially the same thing, two sides of the same coin, advisory board chair Tim Blood said. “The board wanted to send a message saying, ‘Look, you should not use these things without implementing the recommendations.”
Although police rejected the two suggestions regarding warrants and access, they did agree to accept or consider the other 37 recommendations from the board.
Last month, the city’s Public Safety Committee reviewed the 54 surveillance technologies, including the plate readers, and unanimously recommended that the City Council approve their continued use.
“I have to balance the notion that we need to keep people safe from these horrific crimes and that these tools are helping against the theoretical threat of the federal government possibly violating the law and coming and taking these cameras,” Councilmember Marni von Wilpert said at the meeting.
Seth Hall is with the TRUST San Diego Coalition, which helped craft the city’s surveillance ordinances, and he wants the plate readers gone.
“They are telling us, no, just wait. Wait for more bad things to happen, and then maybe we’ll think about shutting Flock down. But we will not wait,” he said at last week’s rally. “Flock’s unsafe technology is in San Diego’s neighborhoods today, eroding trust today, we need to restore trust in our city.”
Barrio Logan resident Tonantzin “Cina” Sánchez noted there are 12 plate readers around Chicano Park and said she fears Black and Latino communities are being targeted. “We’re already the most underserved communities, but you can put millions of dollars into these cameras to over-police us,” she said. “It’s all eyes on us.”
State law permits law enforcement agencies to search each other’s databases. But San Diego’s strict surveillance ordinance makes the city an island — no outside agencies can directly access its data. Any California law enforcement agency that wants San Diego’s data must show it is investigating one of a limited number of types of crimes. And no one outside of California can, including federal agencies.
San Diego police officials said they are conducting weekly audits of the license plate reader use to ensure compliance with state laws, local ordinances and department policy. The audit also verifies that data is accessed for legitimate use.
The department disclosed earlier this year that for the first nearly three weeks that it used the license plate reader system in late 2023 and early 2024, its data was unknowingly available for other California agencies to search — and nearly 13,000 such searches happened. On discovery of that, the switch was toggled off.
Police also said it had intentionally shared data nearly 50 times with federal agencies last year, including the FBI, Homeland Security Investigations, Customs and Border Protection, the Secret Service and the Drug Enforcement Administration, but said none of the cases were related to immigration. Police said they have ended that practice to come into full compliance with state law barring data sharing with out-of-state or federal agencies.
Flock Chief Legal Officer Dan Haley said last week the company understands that “we’re in a particular political moment right now in this country where people have legitimate good faith concerns around surveillance.” However, he said those who oppose the technology could actually benefit from it.
That, Haley said, is because every time the Flock system is searched, a permanent record is created. “In the rare case where that technology is misused, the evidence of that misuse is right there in the platform, and that is by design,” he said.
He also said there is no “massive permanent database” and noted that the default setting is to delete data after 30 days, although agencies can opt to keep their data longer.
“A lot of the concern about Flock is generated by hypotheticals,” Haley said.
Because California prohibits sharing such data with federal and out-of-state agencies, he said Flock in March carved California out of its nationwide lookup service that allows agencies to share data.