At an upcoming meeting, the Watsonville City Council will consider renewing a contract with Atlanta, Ga.-based Flock Safety, which has installed 20 license plate reader cameras throughout the city.
Watsonville signed a two-year contract with Flock in 2023 for $132,000.
In the past six months, the Watsonville Police Department used its automated license plate readers stationed in 20 locations throughout the city 98 times to assist with investigations.
That was the message Tuesday to the Watsonville City Council from Police Captain Donny Thul, who stressed that, while the cameras can be used for legitimate purposes by officers investigating crimes, the information is never shared with federal immigration officials.
In addition, it is not used for facial recognition, or speed tracking, Thul said.
In addition, the data captured by the cameras automatically deletes after 30 days.
“We decide who we want to share it with, and currently we are bound by local and state laws and we cannot share with any agencies outside the state of California and we also cannot share for immigration purposes or anything like that,” he said.
He pointed to a 2023 story to underscore the usefulness of the cameras.
In 2023, a suspect in an attempted murder case came into the city, and when one of the cameras recorded his plate, it alerted officers, who found and stopped his vehicle, during which he stabbed a police K9 officer before he was arrested.
“This stuff is crossing city and county lines, and what we want to do is catch suspects quickly,” Thul said.
Mayor Maria Orozco said she brought the issue to the board to help allay concerns from the public about the devices.
“There is a lot of fear out there, and the purpose of this presentation was to reiterate the fact that we’re not sharing data with ICE,” she said. “And the goal of the police department is to keep the community safe.”
But the American Civil Liberties Union in a report titled “You Are Being Tracked” says that the relatively new technology has no regulatory framework, and as such has been used by some law enforcement agencies to build permanent databases of information about millions of people.
“Automatic license plate readers have the potential to create permanent records of virtually everywhere any of us has driven, radically transforming the consequences of leaving home to pursue private life, and opening up many opportunities for abuse,” the organization says on its website.
