You know how when you are watching some British crime drama on TV, you are frequently reminded that seemingly every city block in the UK has a closed-circuit camera focused on it, so that no one gets away with any shenanigans?
We’re sure that has its advantages. It is also literally the definition of a surveillance state. And that’s a state our own California is heading toward more and more each day.
Gov. Gavin Newsom kept us hurling toward that “1984”-ish world when he recently vetoed a bill passed by the Legislature to tighten rules on how law enforcement in our state can use automated license plate readers.
The governor says he nixed the proposed regulation that would have required police agencies to regularly purge their databases of license plate data because doing so would impede ongoing criminal investigations.
He also claimed that the fiscally strapped state doesn’t have the tax money to perform the frequent audits of how the plate readers — which you can see mounted on streetlight poles all around our cities, along with the surveillance cameras — are used, another important facet of Senate Bill 274.
The governor is wrong. It would seem this is another example of his resume-burnishing on his way to a presidential campaign, in this instance an effort to seem more pro-law enforcement.
What he’s ignoring, as we have warned before, is the evidence of rampant police misuse of license-plate data that caused members of the Legislature to write and pass this bill. As reported in a CalMatters investigation in June, California police “officers on more than 100 occasions violated a state law against sharing the data with federal authorities and others outside the state. … 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.”
And the veto comes on the heels of new CalMatters reporting showing that Riverside County sheriff’s deputies are violating their own internal policies by not documenting the reasons why they have tracked certain license plates.
SB 274 would have limited the kinds of license lists agencies maintain to those related to missing persons or ones maintained by the National Crime Information Center or California Department of Justice. Importantly, it would have required data security and privacy training for officers who want to compile license plate lists, and would have required cops to document specific cases a search is related to.
We fully understand, from a purely policing point of view, the desire to accumulate as much information as they can about the players in this sometimes wild and dangerous world, the better to sort the bad guys out from the good. We are simply saying that indulging in ever-increasing surveillance of citizens is a slippery slope down which our privacy rights are receding.
That’s why law enforcement can’t just wiretap us all at will. That’s why they need a warrant when they knock on our doors.
And nothing shows the dangers of too much information too capriciously scarfed up by law enforcement than the lawsuit filed by Briana Ortega against the Riverside County Sheriff’s Office, its Sheriff Chad Bianco and Deputy Eric Piscatella. Ortega says that after she met Piscatella at a Coachella festival in 2023, he stalked her by illegally obtaining her phone number and address through the Riverside sheriff’s database and frequently ran her license plate through state and local databases to track her movements with no legal cause.
Slow the rapid movement toward total police surveillance of our lives. Revive SB 274.