Mountain View approves automatic license plate cameras, despite community objections

No longer one of the last holdouts in Santa Clara County, Mountain View approved a plan to install automatic license plate cameras in key parts of the city to assist law enforcement investigations, despite some strong objections from community members.

In a unanimous vote, the City Council approved a one-year agreement with Flock Safety to install 24 automatic license plate cameras in Mountain View. The council will have the opportunity to weigh in on the continuation of the pilot program after one year.

The technology is a powerful tool to improve public safety, said Mountain View Police Chief Mike Canfield, who presented the pilot program to the City Council on Tuesday, May 28.

Automated license plate reader (or ALPR) technology is already widely used in the region, Canfield said. He explained that the 24 cameras would be installed at prominent thoroughfares and major exit and entry points in the city.

The cameras scan the back of passing vehicles, capturing their license plate number and other identifying information, like the make and model of the vehicle. The information is then automatically cross-checked with a national database that has a “hot list” of vehicles associated with criminal activity. When a match is made, a real time alert is activated to notify police of the location of the wanted vehicle.

Not only providing real time alerts, the technology also can help police solve crimes after they have been committed, Canfield said. The ALPR data will be stored for 30 days, allowing law enforcement officials to query the system to investigate cases of missing persons, catalytic converter thefts, hit and runs, and other serious crimes. In the case of specific queries, the data will be stored for one year, according to the council report.

But while Canfield focused on the benefits of the ALPR technology, several council members took a more cautious approach, citing concerns about the potential misuse of the surveillance technology and questioning how the city would safeguard the data.

Canfield addressed some of these concerns in his presentation, noting that the ALPR system was not equipped with facial recognition technology. “It is about vehicles and not people,” he said.

The policy presented to the council also prohibits the use of the data for immigration enforcement or out-of-state abortion investigations. If access is granted to the database, it only can be for California law enforcement and not for federal law enforcement, he said.

But Canfield conceded that in order for the system to work it needed to grant some access to regional partners. “If we don’t share our data, other agencies will not share their data with us. That is how the Flock system works. And there is just an expectation of reciprocity when it comes to Flock ALPR data,” he said.

Council member Emily Ann Ramos pushed back on some of the implications of this access, stating that while she trusted the Mountain View Police Department (MVPD), other agencies did not share the strong community relationships that MVPD has cultivated and could use the data for harmful purposes.

Ramos also said she did not trust Flock Safety, a private company that will lease and administer the license-plate readers to the city.

More than 1,000 cities and over 500 police departments in the country are using Flock ALPR cameras, according to the council report, a situation that has alarmed some community members.

During the public comments, Mountain View resident Tim MacKenzie asked for more time for the city to consider alternatives to Flock, which he described as “a private capitalist company selling fear and trying to make the Mountain View taxpayers pay for it so that they can make a profit.”

Several community members also raised concerns about potential civil rights violations, citing cases where innocent people were wrongfully detained by police because of faulty APLR technology.

They also expressed reservations about the expansion of a surveillance system. “We should not accept that our every movement is tracked,” said one Mountain View resident.

But for Council members Margaret Abe-Koga and Lisa Matichak, the benefits of the cameras far outweighed the risks, with both stating that it was time for the city to get on board and implement the technology. They also cited strong support for the program from constituents.

“We’re not at the forefront of this. We’re one of the last cities to get this in the county so I think it is time for us to do this. I think we’ve got enough safeguards in place, both at the city level (and) at the state level as well to protect data,” Matichak said.

Abe-Koga said she would even support adding more Flock cameras in the city.

Ultimately, Council members Alison Hicks, Pat Showalter and Ramos said they would back the pilot project, with a recommendation for it to be brought back to council with updates after a year.

According to the council report, the cameras will be set up eight weeks after the contract is finalized with Flock Safety. It will cost nearly $100,000 to run the project for the first year and $80,000 in subsequent years, the report said.