Half Moon Bay officials weighing automated license plate readers

Now, the topic has once again been brought forward for discussion at a Feb. 20 meeting on its potential to curb crime trends and use in cities within San Mateo County, including Foster City, San Bruno, Burlingame and San Carlos. The San Mateo County Sheriff’s Office recently installed one mobile ALPR unit — with community and city consensus — in the vicinity of Pilarcitos and Kelly avenues, although it was removed after a “de-escalation” of improper and illicit activity in the area.

Councilmember Debbie Ruddock said that she shared the community’s concerns around privacy, but cameras have become such a commonplace tool for surveillance and safety that not installing the technology could create a “gap in the network” that drew crime to the city.

“I’m totally in favor of privacy, I hate the way we’ve become as a society,” she said. “I think we have to just look at the realities on the ground and look at a data-driven approach that might give us the protections we feel we need for our community, rather than just outright saying no on principle.”

Ruddock also pointed to Palo Alto’s ALPR ordinance as a potential model for the city to follow, which was developed in conjunction with ACLU assistance and delineates privacy protections, she said.

The Northern California chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union sent the City Council a letter in response to the discussion, warning of potential misuse of ALPR data, which tracks license plates of all drivers for 30 days.

“It is important to note the vanishingly small amount of potentially useful information collected from ALPRs in proportion to the vast quantity of data they scoop up,” the letter read, citing a .1% hit rate on scanned license plates involved in criminal activity from the Sacramento Police Department.

However, the systems only use the data if license plates are involved in an ongoing criminal investigation, said Sheriff’s Capt. Rebecca Albin, chief of Police Services for the Half Moon Bay Police Bureau and Coastside Patrol Bureau. She noted that in South San Francisco, auto burglaries are down 80% and motor vehicle theft is down 50% after installing ALPRs.

City Manager Matthew Chidester emphasized that statistics around the technology doesn’t always relate to causation in either direction, and the goal of the ALPRs would be crime reduction in conjunction with other policies.

“Statistics from the ACLU, or from the Sheriff’s Office, from other cities, there’s causation and then there’s correlation. It’s really really hard sometimes to identify the implementation of technology as the cause for a change, or does it correlate with a change,” he said. “A lot of times it’s a little bit of both.”

Vice Mayor Harvey Rarbeck was the only councilmember to express unabashed disapproval of potential license plate reader technology.

“Every vehicle gets tagged, law abiding, not law abiding, immigrant, non immigrant,” he said. “It’s just a way that the state can intrude unnecessarily. I’m concerned about the way the information could be available. I’m not saying it will be, but if we talk about the tradeoff between solving crime and individual rights it seems to me that individual rights win in this case.”

Concerns around how the license plate data would be used have long since extended to potential weaponization against undocumented residents, although Albin assured community members that county policy to not share personal information with Immigration and Customs Services would be upheld in regards to ALPRs.

Resident Matt Allen spoke out against the ALPR technology at public comment.

“I came out to voice my disapproval for adopting this plan to install cameras,” he said. “I do not wish to exchange freedom for 1/10th of 1% decrease in crime. It always starts out [as] a trade for our safety but it never stops there. It’s just a part of the totalitarian tiptoe. It will be used for other projects as time goes on.”

But other Half Moon Bay community members, like Krystlyn Giedt, Half Moon Bay Chamber of Commerce president, expressed hope that the technology could be used to minimize break-ins and theft for downtown businesses.

“Unfortunately, our businesses have been hit multiple times over the last year w burglaries and although many of the businesses have cameras on the exteriors of their shops, not every shop has gotten to the point where they have an exterior camera,” she said.

Giedt expressed a desire on behalf of retailers to have at least three ALPR cameras installed, one at either end of Main Street and one at the intersection of Main Street and Kelly Avenue.

Merchant’s desire for increased protection from crime is an important consideration in the debate around installation, Councilmember Deborah Penrose said, although she also expressed worry around privacy and data concerns.

“How do we protect our downtown merchants?” she said. “I think that’s critical, and if the downtown merchants want license plate readers, cameras, I think we outta have that. I think we owe that to them … strategically placed cameras to protect downtown merchants, I’m in favor of. Anything beyond that, I am fearful of.”

Councilmember Richard Brownstone emphasized that surveillance technology is regularly used by private entities like businesses.

“I understand not wanting to give up your privacy, but I think that is so compromised these days, much worse than these cameras … they’re in private stores, they’re pretty much everywhere unregulated,” he said.

The cameras could be funded by money from the city’s COPS grant — a federal grant program for community policing solutions — Chidester said.

City staff took direction to gather more information around data misuse concerns, the usefulness of the cameras in solving crime and how other cities handled the issue.

holly@smdailyjournal.com

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