The new armada of automated license plate readers in SF are taking three million surveillance photos every day, but the SF Police Department is being cagey about disclosing where the hundreds of cameras are located.
The automated license plate readers that SFPD installed around town last January are sitting in plain sight, they are not in any way hidden. Same goes for those mobile surveillance camera towers sitting outside the 16th and 24th Street BART stations, which are often getting tagged, or being used as a sitting space for illegal street vendors, as people may not realize that those things are police cameras. These new cameras and police drones were enabled by Mayor London Breed’s March 2024 ballot measure Prop E, which greatly expanded police surveillance powers.
Now a year into the automated license plate reader (ALRP) program, the Chronicle reports these cameras are taking about three million pictures a day of cars moving about San Francisco. But the Chron also notes that in the last eight months, these three million pictures a day have resulted in only 42,000 “hits,” that is, positive identifications of a vehicle SFPD was looking for. These have apparently resulted in 140 arrests.
But still, three million pictures taken daily to net only 42,000 positive IDs of suspected criminals over eight months means the vast majority of these surveillance photos are of vehicles that are not involved with crime. And privacy advocates worry that that data could be used as a Trump administration tactic to track people getting abortions or gender-affirming medical care, or as a tool for mass deportations.
“When you’re talking about 400 [cameras] concentrated in a very dense location,” Electronic Frontier Foundation senior staff attorney Saira Hussain told the Chronicle, “it really starts to look like people are going to be able to be identified as they’re moving about the city.”
One SF software engineer Matthew Lotocki is on a personal tear to find out and map where these ALPRs are all located, and he put in a public records request for their location. SFPD denied that request.
“I basically can’t leave my house without passing by cameras,” Lotocki said to the Chronicle. “I think it’s one thing for people to say, ‘Oh, the police sort of know that I’m driving over a bridge,’ but it’s another thing to know very clearly where you are in the city.”
Undaunted by the denial, Lotocki filed a complaint with the SF Sunshine Ordinance Task Force. The Task Force sided with him, and ordered the information to be released. And once again, SFPD refused to release the data.
“If the compiled map is disclosed, criminals would be able to structure their movements to avoid the cameras, and even choose targets based on routes that avoid cameras,” Chief Bill Scott said in an October 24 denial letter.
We don’t know how many of these ALPR cameras have been installed in San Francisco, but eventually, there will be 400 of them. The Chronicle points out that Chief Scott’s letter said that in October, these cameras were at about 100 of the city’s 6,400 street intersections. So that likely means there are hundreds more of these ALPR surveillance cameras coming to SF streets, and the police department is determined to not disclose where they will be.
Image: Joe Kukura, SFist
