Surveillance is all around us. From smart phones to Ring cameras, devices are watching us—and recording us.
This includes license-plate scanners. In recent years, the technology has become ubiquitous, and is now used in eight of the nine Coachella Valley cities.
The one exception: Coachella. The east valley city bucked the trend this summer, with the City Council voting 3-2 against a proposal to install 70 ALPR (automated license plate recognition) cameras within its city limits.
Meanwhile, other valley cities are adding more. In October, the Palm Springs City Council approved 15 stationary cameras within its city limits, and the Riverside County Board of Supervisors OK’d 210 additional cameras to be placed in the county, making for a total of 538. Indio will soon add 25 cameras to the 20 it has operated since 2022.
Coachella Mayor Steven Hernandez said he finds it surprising that Coachella is the only valley holdout. The plan to add the cameras was first introduced to the City Council more than two years ago.
“When the conversations started, we weren’t thinking that way,” said Hernandez. “We didn’t know where the other cities in the valley were going. But now? We’re surrounded.”
Hernandez said the council majority ultimately saw the cameras as an encroachment on people’s privacy.
“We get the trends; we get public safety,” Hernandez said. “This is not new. But at the same time, there’s also got to be a voice that says, ‘Can we do things better than creating a surveillance state?’”
In Palm Springs, the City Council decided the benefits to law enforcement efforts outweighed privacy concerns, voting 4-1 in favor of the cameras, with then-Mayor Grace Garner the lone dissenter.
Councilmember Lisa Middleton said she understands the concerns about privacy. “But this is a very modest technology that does fundamentally important police work,” she said.
Local police and the Riverside County Sheriff’s Office have encouraged cities to get on board. Palm Springs, Desert Hot Springs, Indio and Cathedral City have their own police forces; the cities of Palm Desert, Coachella, La Quinta, Indian Wells and Rancho Mirage contract with the county sheriff for public safety. There’s consensus among law enforcement that the cameras deter carjackings and auto theft—and, in some cases, more serious crimes.
Local city councils have, for the most part, been listening. La Quinta voted last spring to install 69 cameras.
In March, the Palm Desert City Council accepted a staff recommendation to amend its original contract with Flock Safety to add 53 more cameras to the 49 in operation since October 2022. Palm Desert’s ALPR bill is $291,100 in the first year, with an annual bill of $258,500 every year thereafter. The report referred to the expensive technology as an “effective force multiplier,” and proposed that the city would save $53,000 with the additional order—because Flock’s yearly subscription rate was about to increase by $500 per camera.
Most Coachella Valley cities use Flock Safety, an Atlanta-based company with contracts in more than 1,500 U.S. cities. The service is subscription-based; Flock provides all equipment and installation. Inclusive of fees, mounting rigs, maintenance, software and upgrades, data storage and LTE connectivity, each camera costs around $2,500-$3,000 a year.
Palm Springs Police Lt. William Hutchinson said there is evidence the cameras increase “solve rates,” citing success stories from all over the state. He said the cameras helped Torrance police disband a 10-person auto-recovery task force, because it was no longer needed. “El Cajon had 50 (car-theft) recoveries in three months. (They said to Palm Springs police), ‘You’re going to love Flock,’” he said.
Palm Desert’s staff report credited the ALPR system with the recovery of 45 stolen vehicles, some containing guns and stolen merchandise. Several pounds of fentanyl and smaller amounts of methamphetamine and cocaine were taken off the street, according to the report.
Privacy Concerns
While law enforcement is pushing hard to add more cameras, groups like the American Civil Liberties Union and the Electronic Frontier Foundation are pushing back. They say the expansion of police surveillance is a slippery slope, and have documented problems with ALPR systems—including cases of misread plates, mistaken identities and traffic stops turned violent, as well as deliberate abuse.
Dave Maass is investigations director at the EFF. He has done extensive research on surveillance technology, government transparency, immigration enforcement, prisoners’ rights and other digital-rights issues, and he said it’s possible these cameras do more harm than good.
“Law enforcement has a very narrow view of the potential for internal abuse of camera data. They don’t believe there are rogue cops or that they make mistakes,” said Maass.
In 2022, the Independent Institute awarded ALPR systems with a California Golden Fleece Award. The Oakland-based public-policy research center awards the dubious honor annually as part of its work to “expose waste, fraud and abuse in California on the state or local level.” The “award” criticized California cities and law enforcement agencies “for adopting automated license plate readers without proper safeguards to protect public privacy and public safety.” According to the Independent Institute’s 19-page report that went along with the award, most police departments started using the cameras before putting data usage or privacy policies in place.
The Independent Institute cited a 2020 California State Auditor’s Office report reviewing ALPR data-processing procedures from four police agencies—the Fresno Police Department, the Los Angeles Police Department, the Marin County Sheriff’s Office and the Sacramento County Sheriff’s Office. The Auditor’s Office determined that none of the four had implemented all of the practices required by Senate Bill 34, which became law in 2015.
Senate Bill 34—one of the few California laws that apply to ALPR systems—requires that personnel receive training on how to use the system. It permits only authorized personnel to access the data, and places restrictions on the sharing of that data.
In 2019, a state audit found wide variations in the amount of time that ALPR data is stored. Among 391 law enforcement agencies surveyed, the average time of storage was two years, but some agencies were keeping archival files for up to five years.
Maass said storing this much data, for this long, is unnecessary and can lead to abuses. “They are storing (information) that is no one’s business. Why not keep it for just three minutes?” he said, referring to the amount of time it takes the system to run a plate against the “hot list” of vehicles reported stolen.
Palm Springs formerly kept ALPR data for up to one year, according to Lt. Hutchinson, but the city recently revised its policy, allowing camera data to be archived for just 30 days.
Cameras can scan 2,000 license plates per minute. According to EFF research, more than 99.9% of the data collected by the mass-surveillance technology is unconnected to any crime or other public-safety interest.
This vast data storage bothered Mayor Hernandez. Despite assurances that data is purged every couple of weeks, he believes local motorists who drive regular routes through the valley will end up generating a continuous loop of data.
“It’s voyeuristic,” said Hernandez, likening the cameras to “big brother.”
The EFF, along with the ACLU and other privacy advocates, lobbied the state to stop law enforcement from sharing data out-of-state.
“In California, what (constitutes) a crime is much different than in other parts of the country,” said Maass.
Defending ‘Sanctuary’
Hernandez said Coachella’s status as a sanctuary city also led to worries about installing the cameras.
Coachella became a sanctuary city in 2017. (Palm Springs and Cathedral City have also declared themselves to be sanctuary cities.) Cities with that designation typically discourage local law enforcement from reporting the immigration status of individuals unless it involves the investigation of a serious crime, and do not coordinate with ICE unless a violent crime is involved.
There was a creeping sense that camera data could be used to target his community.
“This was a concern to us,” said Hernandez. “They’ll argue that they don’t do that, but we don’t even want to go down that route.”
Those fears heightened when the EFF revealed that the Riverside County Sheriff’s Office, the Palm Springs Police Department and the Desert Hot Springs Police Department had been sharing data with law enforcement agencies in other states, including states where abortions are now illegal or severely restricted. EFF investigations have also found that some California agencies had shared ALPR data with Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection.
Hernandez said council members were taken aback to learn this information.
“The council felt that when the sheriff has this information and this data, and has used this data with states throughout the country, and that’s been well documented—then how is privacy being protected?” Hernandez asked.
That sheriff to which Hernandez refers is Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco. The former Oath Keeper made headlines this summer when he joined Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ coalition of sheriffs to address the “border crisis.” Activists decried the sheriff’s actions as anti-immigrant.
“We’re a Latino community, and a lot of our families are first-generation or just recently migrated,” said Hernandez, adding that many of the 42,000 Coachella residents work in the agriculture industry. “They are very essential to production in the Coachella Valley. We were not going to have the local government be part of immigration enforcement.”
In October, California Attorney General Rob Bonta’s office issued a guidance policy regarding ALPR data, making it clear that Senate Bill 34 prohibits police from sharing data collected from license plate readers with out-of-state or federal agencies.
Last year, the EFF made California Public Records Act requests with California law enforcement agencies, asking for lists of agencies with which they were sharing ALPR data. After the Palm Springs Police Department, the Desert Hot Springs Police Department and the Riverside County Sheriff’s Office all disclosed they were sharing data with out-of-state agencies, they received letters from the EFF demanding that they stop.
Lt. Hutchinson said Palm Springs’ response was to indeed stop. “As a precaution and just for good faith, we stopped sharing out of state,” he said.
Middleton said elected officials have to balance privacy concerns with crime prevention.
“I want us always to be incredibly careful and respectful of individuals’ civil liberties,” she said, “but (when a violent crime occurs), we want our police department to be able to move as promptly and as efficiently and as accurately as they possibly can, to get the perpetrator and not someone else.”
While Palm Springs has a popular police chief, Andy Mills, who answers to the city, Coachella’s law enforcement is handled by the county—and, ultimately, Sheriff Bianco. This is one reason why Coachella is considering creating its own police department.
“We’ve been around since 1946, and we’re growing,” said Hernandez. “I’ve been very vocal about (having our own police department) as mayor. We used to, in the 1990s, and there are a lot of folks in the community (who want that now).”
He envisions a city where community policing could make ALPR systems unnecessary. “It’s taking a very holistic approach to public safety,” said Hernandez. “It’s looking at intervention and prevention, and it’s looking at second chances. It’s looking at having community policing and making sure we’re getting at the root causes of crime.”
Hernandez said he’s OK with Coachella being an outlier in a sea of surveillance.
“You know, that’s a cool thing about local democracy: Each city has their own way and their rights to govern themselves,” he said. “And that’s the beauty of our marble cake federalism, if you want to call it that, where communities have the right to govern as they please.”
Updated on Dec. 19 to correct a typo in a date and to clarify some details.
I’ve been aware of the traffic cams for years, as a matter of fact, I accidentally went through a red on year and was surprised to find my very unflattering foto with the ticket. It caught me singing my heart out to the music I was playing, mouth wide open. I stopped singing in the car since then, paid a fine, went to traffic school again. Privacy at home, in public bathrooms, is expected and must be respected. But traffic cams while driving or riding, are needed, as they help solve fatal collissions resulting in deaths and permanent injuries as well as prove to everyone as they did me, I did indeed go through that light then. Moreover, the roads and highways don’t belong to private citizens, although we fund them via our very high taxes. They belong to the cities, Counties and States they run through. If this is put to a vote I will uhesitatingly vote YES.