{"id":392393,"date":"2025-11-20T14:30:09","date_gmt":"2025-11-20T14:30:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/392393\/"},"modified":"2025-11-20T14:30:09","modified_gmt":"2025-11-20T14:30:09","slug":"mayor-hypes-license-plate-readers-doesnt-mention-abuses-san-diego-union-tribune","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/392393\/","title":{"rendered":"Mayor hypes license plate readers, doesn\u2019t mention abuses \u2013 San Diego Union-Tribune"},"content":{"rendered":"

In his recent newsletter<\/a> and across his social media accounts, San Diego Mayor Todd Gloria has been writing about how pleased he is that our city uses Flock Safety\u2019s automated license plate reader (ALPR) technology, which is a network of 500 cameras blanketing San Diego roads, unblinkingly converting nearly 3 million<\/a> vehicle images into trackable data every month. Gloria claims that hundreds of arrests have resulted from the technology\u2019s use and millions of dollars worth of property have been recovered.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s not the whole story, though. As someone who works as part of the TRUST SD Coalition to understand the surveillance technology being used in San Diego, I know some other facts about Flock ALPR that should interest San Diegans.<\/p>\n

For example, San Diegans might be interested in the June 2025 memo<\/a> from San Diego Police Department admitting that San Diego\u2019s Flock ALPR database had been left open to access by agencies outside of San Diego, resulting in thousands of searches of our vehicle records for reasons entirely outside our knowledge or control. That data breach was discovered and resolved in January 2024, but wasn\u2019t disclosed until a public records request this year triggered San Diego police to disclose the incident to the city\u2019s Privacy Advisory Board in June. For its part in the data breach, a representative of Flock apologized<\/a> to our City Council\u2019s Public Safety Committee later that month.<\/p>\n

News of this breach of our data hasn\u2019t made it to the mayor\u2019s newsletters yet. Instead, Gloria praises Flock for being a \u201cforce multiplier.\u201d<\/p>\n

The city later provided the details<\/a> that it had previously\u00a0withheld<\/a>, showing that San Diego\u2019s Flock data had been accessed by 166 outside police departments, such as El Cajon police, which admits it shares ALPR data with federal agencies in open defiance<\/a>\u00a0of California law. In 2025, a growing number of cities like Austin and Denver have voted to reject Flock after leaders realized they had lost control of their city\u2019s data by using Flock\u2019s system.<\/p>\n

There are more interesting incidents. Flock failed an\u00a0audit<\/a> by the state of Illinois. Researchers in Washington discovered<\/a> that the U.S. Border Patrol had gained unpermitted \u201cbackdoor\u201d access to the Flock data of several cities. Police in Texas, as part of a \u201cdeath investigation\u201d of a fetus, used Flock<\/a> to perform a nationwide search for a woman who had an abortion. Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Oregon, has concluded<\/a> that abuse of Flock technology is \u201cinevitable,\u201d and a group of legislators has called for a federal investigation<\/a>\u00a0into Flock\u2019s business and technology.<\/p>\n

But you won\u2019t hear about any of these problems, or any proposed solutions for them, from our city leaders. Mayor Gloria instead praises Flock because it \u201csupports precision policing by alerting officers only when a vehicle is linked to a crime.\u201d<\/p>\n

In Denver, a police officer with access to Flock ALPR was recently recorded<\/a> bullying a woman who he was accusing of having committed a theft in his town. \u201cYou know we have cameras in that jurisdiction,\u201d he told her, \u201cand you can\u2019t get a breath of fresh air, in or out of that place, without us knowing, correct?\u201d The woman had to go \u201con the warpath\u201d against the false accusations to prove her innocence.<\/p>\n

This is the Flock technology Mayor Gloria says \u201creduces unnecessary stops and allows officers to focus their time where it\u2019s needed most.\u201d<\/p>\n

The risks and dangers of Flock are now verified and increasingly well-known, but Gloria isn\u2019t sharing them with San Diegans. City leaders are leaving it up to individual citizens to look deeper if we want to know anything beyond the happy talk.<\/p>\n

It should be inconceivable in a first-class city like ours that we continue to use taxpayer dollars to fund a mass surveillance technology while evidence piles up that it threatens our neighbors and our rights, rather than keeping us safe. Supporters of the technology claim Flock might help solve some crimes, but they ignore the many other options for solving crimes besides resigning ourselves to a future of abusive, AI-enabled public tracking technology like Flock. The only Flocks in San Diego should be the flocks of people calling their elected leaders to demand this insane technology be purged from our city.<\/p>\n

Hall is co-founder of the community group sandiegoprivacy.org<\/a> and lives in Allied Gardens.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In his recent newsletter and across his social media accounts, San Diego Mayor Todd Gloria has been writing…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":392394,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5134],"tags":[5229,1582,276,11890,1269,3549,7264,67,586,132,5230,68,2969],"class_list":{"0":"post-392393","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-san-diego","8":"tag-america","9":"tag-ca","10":"tag-california","11":"tag-commentary","12":"tag-opinion","13":"tag-san-diego","14":"tag-sandiego","15":"tag-united-states","16":"tag-united-states-of-america","17":"tag-unitedstates","18":"tag-unitedstatesofamerica","19":"tag-us","20":"tag-usa"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115582509056953620","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/392393","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=392393"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/392393\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/392394"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=392393"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=392393"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=392393"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}