The cost of the contract is staggering, and we’re seeing a move to the other vendors as Flock was used to take the heat as they try to make the case for keeping the technology and using other vendors. And the other vendors will be less noticeable.
https://reclaimthenet.org/lapd-axon-license-plate-readers-san-fernando-valley
The safeguards are department policy, which means the department can also change them.
By Ken Macon
The Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) will go ahead with its plan to install Axon license plate readers on city streetlights in the west San Fernando Valley.
The Los Angeles City Council voted on October 27 to try to stop the move, but the vote fell one short of the ten needed to veto the Police Commission’s September 22 decision. The Los Angeles Times writes that the pilot, which will cover parts of Council District 3, such as Encino, Woodland Hills, and Tarzana, is now expected to launch “in the near future.”
The cameras are attached to the top of streetlights and draw power from them. According to the LAPD’s own slides, the system captures a vehicle and its plate image “along with the date, time, location, and certain vehicle characteristics” – and it does this for every car, not just those suspected of any crime.
“Never has the city had so much information on our residents where we can see what they’re doing and where they’re at,” Councilmember Hugo Soto-Martinez said, adding that before the new project is rolled out, the city should first conduct an independent audit of how data collected so far has been used, and put in place more stringent rules on the use of license plate readers.
“We should take the time to make sure that we have thorough, thoughtful protections laid out before we install our cameras,” Soto-Martinez said.
Another councilor, Eunisses Hernandez, noted that the promise of oversight and accountability had been made before, but that the policies to back it up were still lacking.
“We were told that there will be oversight and that there will be accountability,” she said, warning that the pilot would “expand the surveillance infrastructure that could put those same families at risk.”
Instead of addressing these issues, the LAPD has produced new guidelines for the use of license plate readers.
The guidelines, issued on October 16 by Chief Jim McDonnell, include cutting the time data stays searchable from two years to 90 days, and limiting the number of officers who can access it to 4,000, who will first have to get approval from their supervisor, undergo online training, and pass a test.
The purpose of using the data is also to be limited to criminal investigations, missing persons, and other “serious public safety matters,” while searches based solely on First Amendment activity will not be allowed.
Cmdr. Randy Goddard explained that the system generates an alert, and that “under department policy it is not probable cause.”
The new rules also suspend direct access to the data for outside agencies, but the LAPD will continue to share it with them on a case-by-case basis, providing the request is made on the agency’s letterhead. The list of those who will continue to have access includes the police in Torrance and Glendale, as well as the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department.
No new agreements will be made during the pilot, said Chief Information Officer Dean Gialamas, who described the guidelines as “a considerably more restrictive and accountable operating model.” He also said that “many of these safeguards are already being implemented.”
The LAPD also promises that no fixed cameras will be installed within 200 feet of clinics whose main purpose is reproductive or gender-affirming care.
Councilmember Soto-Martinez is not convinced, and specifically criticized the large number of officers who will have access to the data, saying, “I don’t like that there’s 4,000 people without an analysis whether they deserve to keep having (access to ALPR data) or not.”
The guidelines are not a law, but rules written by the department, which means they can also be rewritten by the department.
While the retention of data has been cut to 90 days, this is still more than ten times the default period that Flock, the previous vendor, now recommends.
The company recently said, “We are updating our recommendation and default to a 7-day retention,” and a federal judge in Oklahoma has described license plate readers as “a type of indiscriminate mass surveillance” that lets police “indiscriminately and passively catalog your whereabouts over an extended period of time.”
The judge made the statement in a ruling in a case that involved only a month’s worth of data, while the LAPD plans to keep it for three times that.
In July, the Police Commission suspended the LAPD’s use of Flock after the department’s own inspector general found that officers had improperly investigated 161 people whose vehicles were wrongly flagged as stolen.
The bigger picture is that in September the Police Commission approved a 10-year, $235 million contract with Axon that includes more than 1,600 patrol-car cameras equipped with plate readers. Axon CEO Rick Smith told investors that agencies want to “convert from existing license plate readers to us.”
Hamid Khan of the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition said, “It’s not about just one license plate reader; it’s part of a much bigger system.”
It’s a system the city seems to be committed to, having dropped one vendor over privacy concerns only to sign up with another. And the fact that the council could not muster the necessary 10 votes to stop the latest plan means that the safeguards will be those promised by the police department itself – in other words, the fox will be in charge of the henhouse.