Public Records

SPJ Madison Award for Oakland Public Records Lawsuit

by  •  • 0 Comments

The Northern California chapter of the Society for Professional Journalists has given out their annual James Madison Award in the Advocacy category to the legal team that filed a class action suit against the Oakland Police Department over thousands of backed-up public records requests. Journalists Scott Morris, Brian Krans and Sarah Belle Lin, and Oakland Privacy filed the suit on behalf of all requesters and the legal team secured a settlement that required the processing of all requests, including some backed up for almost a decade or more, within the next two years.

SPJ’s Award committee stated: Representing journalists facing burdensome wait times for public records, this legal team compelled the Oakland Police Department to reform their public records process to reduce delays and make records promptly available. On behalf of journalists Scott Morris, Sarah Belle Lin, and Brian Krans – plus citizens’ coalition Oakland Privacy and its director of research, Michael Katz-Lacabe – the team successfully sued OPD in a class action lawsuit, forcing the department to clear its backlog of public records requests and ensure timely responses going forward. The coalition’s persistence has had immediately tangible results: since the lawsuit was filed in 2020, OPD has cleared over 4,000 outstanding records requests. 

Last year, Oakland Privacy’s lawsuit against the City of Vallejo after the secret acquisition of a cell site simulator won the Madison Award in the citizen activism category.

License Plate Readers

Legislative Proposal Seeks to Sanction Federal and Out of State ALPR Sharing

by  •  • 0 Comments

Update: AB 2192 was held in the Assembly Privacy committee and is dead. Oakland Privacy and the Electronic Frontier Foundation provided witness testimony on the bill in both the Assembly Transportation and Assembly Privacy committees.

A bill proposed by Assembly member James Ramos (D-Rancho Cucamonga) and sponsored by the CA State Sheriffs Assn seeks to write into California state law that automated license plate reader scans can be freely shared by CA law enforcement agencies with federal and out of state agencies, including police and sheriff departments across the nation, and federal agencies like the Border Patrol, IRS, FBI, DEA, ATF and the US Marshalls.

Current law, although regularly flouted, restricts sharing to public agencies located inside the state and the state’s sanctuary law prevents information sharing that aids federal immigration enforcement. AB 2192 would change those current restrictions. A current lawsuit, Lageleva v Marin County Sheriff seeks to enforce existing law and likely provided the motivation for the sheriffs association to try to change the law.

Public records requests have found that many California agencies share their ALPR scans with as many as 800 other law enforcement agencies, including many rural red state sheriffs who may be enforcing new restrictions on abortion and trans youth health care. 99.8% of license plate reader data collected by CA law enforcement agencies has zero connection to any crime and per the California State Auditor, the current collection and distribution of ALPR’s in California violates the privacy rights of Californians.

AB 2192 should be stopped. Stay tuned for more on how to take action to oppose this bill, but if you’d like to tell the author that you don’t like their bill, you can call them at (916) 319-2040.

Cell Site Simulators, UASI

Stingray Secrecy and the San Jose Police Department

by  •  • 0 Comments

Since 2014, San Jose has been claiming that a non-disclosure agreement with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) pertaining to its purchase of a cell-site simulator from Harris Corporation is completely exempt from disclosure. After more than seven years, the San Jose Police Department released a heavily-redacted copy of the non-disclosure agreement it signed with the FBI on April 4, 2013.

Read more →

Use of Force and Tasers

When A Law Is Your Life: An Oakland Privacy Story

by  •  • 0 Comments

Assembly Bill 229 became law on January 1, 2022. The new law, which requires use of force training for private security guards and employees of alarm companies, was one of two dozen or so bills that Oakland Privacy supported in its journey through the Legislature in 2021. Like all laws, it has a story behind it.

On July 2, Mario Mathews, a 39 year old Latinx man who weighed all of 125 pounds, trespassed into the Sacramento Kings arena in the early hours of the morning. He mimicked shooting some baskets, and may have been experiencing a mental health issue, but carried no weapon or engaged in any dangerous behavior. Arena security guards detained him, handcuffed him, and then placed a knee on his neck George Floyd-style. The officer kept his knee on Mario’s neck for at least 4 full minutes. Matthews went unresponsive, was sent to the hospital and died.

Read more →

Uncategorized

Oakland Privacy’s Year in Bullet Points – 2021

by  •  • 1 Comment

Some of the things Oakland Privacy had a hand in in 2021:

  • Received the James Madison Freedom of Information Award.
  • Passage of Oakland’s and Berkeley’s Militarized Equipment Regulation Ordinances.
  • Creation of the BadApple toolkit for police accountability.
  • Castro neighborhood in San Francisco rejecting a gift of surveillance cameras.
  • Settlement of Long Beach PD and Fresno Sheriff public records lawsuits
  • Creation of a Vallejo Surveillance Oversight Board.
  • Rose Foundation grant to fund an Oakland Privacy Fellow for two years.
  • Settlement of a public records lawsuit against the Oakland Police Department, with their agreement to satisfy all public records requests outstanding (literally 1000’s) over a period of 12-18 months.

Check out our doings for 2019.

Check out our doings for 2020.

Transparency Ordinance

SF Mayor Breed Attacks San Francisco Surveillance Transparency Ordinance

by  •  • 0 Comments

In a woefully inaccurate news release issued at 5pm on January 18, 2022, the mayor of San Francisco London Breed, describes San Francisco’s surveillance ordinance as an “obstacle” to law enforcement and declares an intention to modify it, by ballot initiative if necessary, to allow unfettered use of private camera networks for real-time monitoring by SFPD if a “public safety crisis” or “open-air drug market” is declared. Breed’s full press release can be read here.

Oakland Privacy responds to Mayor Breed’s false characterization of what SF’s surveillance ordinance allows here.

Tracy Rosenberg from Oakland Privacy comments: The use of any surveillance technology with impunity is a recipe for disaster. We’ve seen the building of a surveillance state with just these kinds of demands for unfettered and unregulated use. “Trust us” is not the answer for technology. It’s having clear rules of the road. San Francisco’s mayor and police department saying “we don’t want no stinking rules” is really disappointing. Rules are not “an obstacle,” they are a safety measure.”

SF Chronicle coverage