The San Leandro City Council voted 4-3 to reject, for now, a police proposal to double the number of license plate readers in the East Bay town from 41 to 82. The initial 41 were approved in 2022, but just recently were fully installed,
The Council discussion was lengthy (over an hour and a half). We have pulled a few video clips with particularly interesting Q+A below.
The clips contain the acting police chief stating for the record that 15 days retention of plate scans that are not of interest in a criminal matter is “right for us” and that 30 days is “normal”, although the average retention period by the state’s police officers is closer to a year than to 30 days. The acting police chief also says in no uncertain terms that he has seen no evidence and is not inclined to believe that license plate readers deter or prevent crimes from happening.
Council members ask a number of blunt questions, some unfortunately revealing the lack of due diligence that accompanied the initial deployment i.e. do we have a policy, where is it, what does it say?
While we are glad the Council took more time and had a thorough discussion, we have to ask what it will take for surveillance deployment decision makers to be fully informed because it is clear that it isn’t happening.