On June 24, an en banc panel of the Fourth Circuit of Appeals issued a ruling in Leaders of a Beautiful Struggle v City of Baltimore that the aerial high definition surveillance planes flown over Baltimore were an unconstitutional violation of the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition against warrantless searches, citing Carpenter v United States. You can read the decision below.
Update: On July 13, the Hayward City Council approved the drone purchase on a 5-2 vote, but required city adminstration to return with a fully operational policy prior to deployment.
After initially backing off due to community concerns, the Hayward Police Department has renewed its request for an unspecified number of drones for use by the Police and Fire Departments. The preliminary request was tabled until a usage policy was prepared and a report done by the City’s IT department on information security.
The two reports will be presented with the request for purchase at the Hayward City Council meeting on July 13 at 7:00pm. The drones are item 3 on the agenda.
On Monday June 7, the board of the Community Benefits District in San Francisco’s Castro neighborhood became the first SF CBD to reject a networked camera system being gifted to the city’s business districts by Ripple CEO Chris Larsen. Larsen’s camera systems which are assembled and installed by a vendor called AVS, have been promoted by the cop nonprofit SF SAFE as a quasi private/public solution for property and nuisance crimes including auto theft, shoplifiting and graffitti.
AVS camera systems have already been installed in the city’s Downtown, Tenderloin and Japantown districts. The Downtown camera system was accessed for real time monitoring of the June 2020 Black Lives Matter protests, which is currently being litigated in the state courts.
Castro community groups including both LGBTQ democratic clubs, the Harvey Milk Club and the Alice B. Toklas Club, the Castro LGBTQ Cultural District, and the neighboring United to Save The Mission came out strongly against the proposal, as did the Castro Merchants Association.
The Aaron Swartz Day Police Surveillance Project teamed up with Priveasy to create a set of tools designed to assist in the ongoing fight for police and sheriff accountability. Bad Apple (https://BadApple.tools) contains a) a searchable database of verified oversight commissions b) a searchable collection of public records act templates c) a growing database of officers and investigative reports and d) a private tip submission line.
All of the technology powering Bad Apple is completely open source (https://GitHub.com/P5vc) and released under a CC-BY-SA-4.0 license, allowing for maximum transparency. The Bad Apple website is available in both English and Spanish, and is designed to be completely accessible.
Read more here.
The City of Berkeley has moved ahead with an oversight and transparency ordinance for controlled military equipment like armored vehicles and assault rifles. To the best of our knowledge, they are the first city in the country to do so. The effort was spearheaded by council woman Kate Harrison, supported by mayor Jesse Arreguin and council members Ben Bartlett and Terry Taplin and passed unanimously. Similar legislation is on tap in Oakland and on a statewide level, in David Chiu’s Assembly Bill 481.
Controlled equipment regulation requires council-approved use policies for a list of military and military-style equipment, approval prior to acquisition, and annual reporting on use metrics. The law follows a startling increase in proto-military equipment owned by municipal police departments over the past two decades, and several academic studies showing the use of such equipment neither prevents crime nor increases officer safety, but instead can escalate violence and excessive use of force incidents.
There are 32 agencies that submit license plate reader data to the Northern California Regional Intelligence Center (NCRIC), the regional fusion center for Northern California. However, many more agencies are able to access that data once it has been sent to the NCRIC.
According to records received in response to a public records request, 71 agencies queried the NCRIC license plate database between February 21 and March 21, 2021. While the agencies looking up license plates at the NCRIC are generally law enforcement agencies located in Northern California, a few of these agencies may stand out as somewhat unusual. The United States Department of Agriculture Office of Inspector General had the 11th highest number of queries to the license plate reader database. Other agencies included the National Park Service, the California Department of Motor Vehicles, and the US Postal Inspection Service.