The Costa Mesa City Council recently voted 6-1 to maintain its contract with Flock, a company that provides 46 automated license plate readers (ALPRs) that track the movements of people driving through the city. Most residents at the council meeting expressed concern given the possibility for misuse of the system, which is used by police to compare license plates to law-enforcement records to make arrests and track stolen vehicles.
Public fears are not unfounded despite police assurances. Chief Joyce LaPointe told the public, according to VoiceofOC: “Every access must have a legitimate law enforcement purpose, and misuse is not tolerated.” An incident in the city and similar ones nationwide suggest otherwise.
A Costa Mesa officer in April pleaded guilty to the alleged harassment of a woman. He also was “accused of accessing the police department’s Flock license plate reader system in order to locate his mistress’ vehicle and the vehicle of the woman’s romantic interests,” per the Orange County District Attorney’s Office. The former officer was ordered to complete a domestic-violence program and given three months of “informal probation.”
Given the DA’s “wrist slap,” residents shouldn’t feel confident that Big Brother technology — increasingly embraced by California cities — will always be used correctly. “Kansas police used them to pursue a man who wrote a critical op-ed about the department,” explained the ACLU. “A mother and her children were held at gunpoint because ALPR cameras wrongly flagged their car as stolen.”
Sure, the cameras can solve some crimes, but is it worth the erosion of our civil liberties? That’s the core question, which is being debated locally given insufficient restraints from the state and federal governments. A growing number of cities are indeed rejecting this Chinese-style mass surveillance, but Costa Mesa stuck with the status quo and merely asked city staff to renegotiate a few terms in the contract when it comes up for renewal next year.
There’s still time for the council to rethink its position, but Costa Mesa residents need to watch the city’s behavior as closely as the city watches them.