Santa Rosa residents and community members alongside the North Bay Organizing Project shared their concerns with Santa Rosa Police Chief John Cregan over Flock cameras and surveillance at the town’s Community Advisory Board meeting last month, on July 22.
After Cregan held a presentation on Flock cameras and ALPRs, community members had two minutes each for public comment. During the presentation Cregan said he would be open to meeting with the North Bay Organizing Project.
The Police Chief also brought attention to an upcoming community conversation on ALPRs on September 17, 6:00 p.m. at 35 Stony Point Road.
“I’m anti-crime, but I think it’s important to look at the trade-offs. We’re looking at mainly retail theft grants that are supporting this, and we have a huge trade-off of data collection of our habits, the places that we go to worship, our healthcare that we might get, where we take our kids and when. And I don’t think that’s a healthy trade-off for a community,” said one Santa Rosa resident during open comment.
Another, had direct questions about SRPD’s Policy with Flock.
- Are we auditing our outside agency searches like we audit SRPD searches?
- Can outside agencies download and store the data that they collect from our Agency indefinitely?
- Have Flock cameras contributed to crime prevention in Santa Rosa, and what metrics are we tracking in order to measure the answer to that question?
Parker Kristine is a volunteer with NBOP’s Civil Liberties Task Force. They helped create informational zines on Flock cameras, tailored to each of Santa Rosa’s districts. For the past few months, Task Force volunteers have knocked door-to-door in Santa Rosa handing out the zines, and conversing with residents about their concerns with surveillance and Flock cameras.
In Kristine’s experiences door knocking, Santa Rosa residents have had varying opinions on the cameras. Some don’t want them at all, others are fine with cameras for “public safety” – but nearly all people they’ve talked to dislike and/or distrust that the cameras are owned by an out-of-state private corporation.
“That seems to be the most common ground for people even across political ideologies,” said Kristine in an interview with North Bay Vanguard, “It seems to be the majority of folks, if they are for cameras, they are still against Flock in general, and even then, most of the people still didn’t know about it.”
While SRPD says Flock Data is not shared with Federal Agencies and is only held for 30 days, community members still have concerns. Data breaches, unauthorized searches in the database, and illegally sharing data with third parties were just some of the issues raised in the meeting.
“You can’t verify that our data will be secure,” Kristine said, “There’s so many cities around right now that are successfully getting rid of Flock, that are ending the contracts, getting rid of these cameras – it’s this wave across the U.S. and we have the ability to make that happen for our home too.”
Stephanie Locey is a volunteer and community organizer with NBOP’s Civil Liberties Task Force. She helped lead a teach-in the week prior on Flock cameras outside Santa Rosa City Hall.
“We do in fact have a right to privacy. I think that feeling of having a right to privacy has been very slowly eroded over time by these tech companies,” said Locey in an interview with North Bay Vanguard.
In the past 30 days, Santa Rosa Flock Cameras and ALPRs have detected over 730,000 unique license plate reads, according to the SRPD’s Flock Transparency Portal. Over 300 police departments and organizations in California are granted access to Santa Rosa CA PD data.
This includes police departments in San Francisco, San Jose, Vallejo, and sheriff’s departments, like the Sonoma County Sheriff’s Office.
Last June an audit revealed that San Francisco police Flock license plate camera data was accessed by outside agencies.
According to CBS News, “The SFPD said it had legally authorized the Northern California Regional Intelligence Center, a California law enforcement intelligence-sharing center, to access its ALPR data, but the department found that NCRIC’s access was used to conduct searches on behalf of outside agencies that had no direct access to SFPD’s system themselves. The department did not identify the outside agencies involved.”
The next community meeting on Flock Cameras with the Santa Rosa Police Department is on September 17, 6:00 p.m. at 35 Stony Point Road.
