More Local Concerns About Automated License Plate Readers; the Feds Make Chicago a ‘War Zone’–Coachella Valley Independent’s Indy Digest: Oct. 6, 2025

Indy Digest: Oct. 6, 2025

In December 2023, we published a piece headlined “Privacy vs. Public Safety: Eight of the Nine Coachella Valley Cities Use Automated License Plate Recognition Cameras—and This Concerns Civil-Liberties Advocates.” The story examined how eight of the nine Coachella Valley cities—Coachella being the exception—use the technology:

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.

There’s no doubt these cameras are an invaluable tool for local law enforcement officers. But there’s also no doubt that there’s a potential for the tech to be used inappropriately—and these competing interests have pushed the cameras back into the news.

Our partners at Calmatters report:

Gov. Gavin Newsom vetoed a bill that would have tightened rules on how police in California use automated license plate readers, saying the regulations would impede criminal investigations.

The Legislature approved the proposal last month amid reports police were misusing the data, including a CalMatters story in June showing that officers on more than 100 occasions violated a state law against sharing the data with federal authorities and others outside the state.

The veto comes as new CalMatters reporting shows Riverside County Sheriff’s deputies appear to have violated internal policy by not documenting why they tracked certain license plates.

In his veto message this week, Newsom cited examples of how the proposed restrictions, which would have required police to better document their searches and delete some of their data within two months, could stymie police work.

“For example,” he wrote, “it may not be apparent, particularly with respect to cold cases, that license plate data is needed to solve a crime until after the 60-day retention period has elapsed.” …

The measure vetoed by the governor, Senate Bill 274, would have limited the kinds of license plate monitoring lists agencies can use to those related to missing persons or license plate lists maintained by the National Crime Information Center or California Department of Justice. It also would have required data security and privacy training for officers who use the tech and force them to document which specific case or task force work a search is related to.

There’s a lot to unpack here, but the element I found to be most interesting and concerning is the apparent misuse by the Riverside County Sheriff’s Office—which, again, handles local policing in five of the valley’s nine cities.

Calmatters goes on to report:

A database of license plate lists from July to August reviewed by CalMatters shows that the Riverside County Sheriff’s Department, which has a network of more than 500 cameras, maintained hundreds of custom license plate lists from July to August, adding more than 700 plates to the lists in that time. Close to 100 of the plates tracked in lists were added using vague justifications, which makes it difficult to verify if deputies complied with laws and policies around use of the technology. Under department policy, tracking lists must include, among other things, “specific incident details.”

It’s not clear if deputies properly shared all hotlists with supervisors. Some have names that contain words like “personal” or “private.” A total of 32 of them have access permissions limiting alerts of a plate sighting to a single user. Riverside County Sheriff’s office automated license plate reader policy states that “no user shall create a custom hot list accessible only to themselves.” …

The database shows that deputies have several practices that would have been outlawed had Newsom signed the bill to further regulate license plate readers.

In addition to detailing some incidences of misuse, the story includes this tidbit: “Police and sheriff’s departments have a history of violating other laws by using license plate readers. A CalMatters investigation in June found that roughly a dozen law enforcement agencies throughout Southern California shared data with federal immigration agencies like Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Border Patrol, a violation of a California law that went into effect 10 years ago. That same log had tens of thousands of searches with no clear justification.”

One of those law enforcement agencies sharing data with ICE? The Riverside County Sheriff’s Office.

Perhaps SB 274, with its 60-day deletion mandate, went too far. But the actions of some members of the local sheriff’s office—read the Calmatters story for more examples—illustrate why stronger rules are needed regarding the use of license plate recognition cameras. Let’s hope lawmakers can get a better version of the bill to the governor soon.

—Jimmy Boegle

More News

• Before we get to the (rather terrifying) news links, here’s some information from the LGBTQ Community Center of the Desert: “Today, the LGBTQ Community Center of the Desert launched an online survey to better understand the experiences and needs of the Coachella Valley’s LGBTQ+ population and help steer future community programs. Every valley resident, full- or part-time, who identifies as LGBTQ+ is encouraged to set aside 30 minutes in October to complete the survey. It is available in English and Spanish at tinyurl.com/ShoutOutCoachellaValley. ‘At The Center, everything we do is driven by the needs, hopes, and lived experiences of LGBTQ+ people in the Coachella Valley.’ said Center CEO Mike Thompson. … Survey questions relate to people’s experiences around accessing local services, connections to the community, personal safety, discrimination, and other topics. The survey can be completed anonymously, and responses will not be shared with others. The first 1,000 respondents will be eligible to receive a $15 electronic VISA gift card. Winners will be contacted via email, but an email address is not required to participate in the survey.”

• The chilling Rolling Stone headline: “‘They Need to Suffer’: Inside Trump’s War on Dissent—After Charlie Kirk’s murder, Trump expanded his war on free speech, the left, and ordinary Americans. It’s going to get worse.” The lede: “They didn’t waste a day. In the aftermath of conservative podcaster Charlie Kirk’s assassination, Donald Trump’s government immediately got to work crafting its road map for cracking down on liberal groups and the president’s domestic foes. According to sources with direct knowledge of the matter, within 24 hours of the Kirk shooting, top Trump officials and administration lawyers—at the White House, Justice Department, and so forth—had already put pen to pad, drafting legal memos, writing blueprints for any number of possible executive actions, and prioritizing which liberal organizations and strongholds of the left needed targeting. At the top of these frantic intradepartmental efforts sat Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff, who personally supplied several names for key targets, as he worked the phones with other government officials to stress to them that the administration was now ‘at war.’”

• Meanwhile, Chicago is essentially a war zone—because of the actions of the feds, not anyone or anything in Chicago. Stop and read these sentences from The Associated Press, and really think about how terrible this is: “Storming an apartment complex by helicopter as families slept. Deploying chemical agents near a public school. Handcuffing a Chicago City Council member at a hospital. Activists, residents and leaders say increasingly combative tactics used by federal immigration agents are sparking violence and fueling neighborhood tensions in the nation’s third-largest city. ‘They are the ones that are making it a war zone,’ Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker said Sunday on CNN. ‘They fire tear gas and smoke grenades, and they make it look like it’s a war zone.’ More than 1,000 immigrants have been arrested since an immigration crackdown started last month in the Chicago area. The Trump administration has also vowed to deploy National Guard troops in its agenda to boost deportations. But U.S. citizens, immigrants with legal status and children have been among those detained in increasingly brazen and aggressive encounters which pop up daily across neighborhoods in the city of 2.7 million and its many suburbs.”

• If you’re paying out-of-pocket for Ozempic or Wegovy, The Washington Post has some news you may want to know: “Popular weight-loss drugs Ozempic and Wegovy are now being sold at below sticker prices at Costco pharmacies across the United States, as rising obesity levels boost demand for the drugs and cheaper copycat versions. Novo Nordisk’s U.S. president, David Moore, told NBC News that the drugmaker’s push into Costco is a way to ‘offer the real, authentic Wegovy and Ozempic where patients seek care.’ It comes as the Danish pharmaceutical giant seeks to head off competition from rival manufacturers, after sales of copycat drugs from compound pharmacies soared amid national shortages. The drugs, which mimic a natural hormone to curb hunger and make people feel full for longer, will be available on prescription to Costco members for an out-of-pocket price of $499 a month. … Novo Nordisk already sells a monthly supply of Ozempic and Wegovy for $499 on its website, and it offers the same discount at CVS and Walmart. Rival Eli Lilly started offering its weight-loss drug, Zepbound, for $499 in February.”

• The new U.S. Supreme Court term starts today. A civics professor, writing for The Conversation, offers a preview, of sorts: “The major cases in October and November address the role of race in elections, conversion therapy and the Trump tariffs. Later cases include campaign finance and transgender sports. This year’s controversies focus on three dominant themes. One is the continuing constitutional revolution in how the justices read our basic law. The court has shifted from a living reading of the Constitution, which says the Constitution should adapt to the American people’s evolving values and the needs of contemporary society, to an original reading, which aims to enforce the constitutional principles understood by the Americans who ratified them. Another clear theme is the deep cultural division among Americans. The core disputes at the court this year reflect controversial factual questions about gender and race: How pervasive and influential is racism in the current day? Are gender transitions a recognized fact, which means that they must be accepted in sports competitions, or can a state assert that trans athletes are not women? A final theme is the struggle for partisan advantage embedded in several cases.”

• And finally … PEN America‘s latest “Banned in the USA” report is out. The AP goes over this year’s findings: “A new report on book bans in U.S. schools finds Stephen King as the author most likely to be censored and the country divided between states actively restricting works and those attempting to limit or eliminate bans. PEN America’s ‘Banned in the USA’ … tracks more than 6,800 instances of books being temporarily or permanently pulled for the 2024-2025 school year. The new number is down from more than 10,000 in 2023-24, but still far above the levels of a few years ago, when PEN didn’t even see the need to compile a report. Some 80% of those bans originated in just three states that have enacted or attempted to enact laws calling for removal of books deemed objectionable. … ‘It is increasingly a story of two countries,’ says Kasey Meehan, director of PEN’s Freedom to Read program and an author of Wednesday’s report. ‘And it’s not just a story of red states and blue states. In Florida, not all of the school districts responded to the calls for banning books. You can find differences from county to county.’”

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