The San Diego Police Department’s automated license plate recognition database was searched nearly 13,000 times during the early weeks of its implementation in 2023 and 2024, a concern many had leading up to the city’s adoption of the technology.
Privacy advocates’ alarm stemmed from the potential for data breaches and cross-agency data sharing from automated license plate readers, often referred to as ALPRs.
In a memorandum to the city’s Privacy Advisory Board on Friday, the department admitted to an almost three-week period during which other California law enforcement agencies were able to search the San Diego ALPR database.
The San Diego Police Department uses the company Flock, based in Atlanta, for ALPRs. Flock has a network of searchable databases that other law enforcement agencies can access.
San Diego’s settings were meant to bar other agencies from searching San Diego data, but there was a misconfiguration leading to almost three weeks where the database was open to outside searches.
“One of the ways in which vendors like Flock have been so successful is by essentially creating this false sense of security that a individual police department’s use policy is going to be enough to govern whether or not a city’s ALPR data gets out,” said Sara Hamid, the associate director of activism for the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
ALPR concerns have grown in recent weeks. As immigration raids increase, San Diegans have expressed worries that the technology could be used to target immigrants, especially if data is shared with federal law enforcement agencies like Homeland Security or Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
California law prohibits the sharing of ALPR data with out-of-state, federal or private agencies. However, according to the San Diego Police Department’s 2024 annual surveillance report, information was shared with HSI and Customs and Border Protection a total of 10 times.
These instances were not related to immigration, according to both the report and Capt. Charles Lara.
Cross-agency sharing was stopped altogether following a department-wide memo on May 23.
“We’ve halted all sharing with federal, out-of-state entities, regardless of the reason. This change reflects our commitment to complying fully with state law and maintaining those strong local privacy protections,” Lara said.
From Dec. 29, 2023, to Jan. 17, 2024, San Diego’s license plate reader database was searched 12,914 times. The database was searched another 795 times on December 28, 2023, but the cameras were not turned on yet, so there was no available data.
“We don’t know how it’s being used, and that lack of guarantee over how it’s being used means that it could be used in any number of harmful ways that we wouldn’t even be aware of,” said Seth Hall, the founder of San Diego Privacy, a member of the Transparent and Responsible Use of Surveillance Technology San Diego Coalition.
This almost three-week period was initially omitted from the San Diego Police Department’s 2024 annual surveillance report. Department officials said the omission was an oversight.
Moving forward, there are plans to improve the department’s auditing procedures to prevent future omissions. The department also has committed to formally re-submitting the surveillance report to accurately reflect that period of time, according the Lyndsay Winkley, the department’s community liaison manager.
Prior to the news of the setting misconfiguration, there was concerns over potential data breaches, regardless of SDPD’s policies and safeguards.
“Even in a case where the law enforcement professionals with the San Diego PD perfectly adhere to their use policy … there are still unspecified instances where sharing happens with federal agencies or with law enforcement agencies,” Hamid said.
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