In March of 2018, the small East Bay city of San Pablo delayed a $2.4 million dollar expansion of their Vigilant Solutions license plate reader surveillance system after community distress about Vigilant’s contract with Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE). A third of the city’s population are non-citizen immigrants per census data.
San Pablo eventually went ahead with the expansion after a community meeting and a city council resolution to add a clause to the Vigilant contract that would financially compensate the City and terminate the contract if any license plate data was shared with ICE through Vigilant’s LEARN database, which stores all of the plate scans.
In response to a public records request filed some time ago, the City of San Pablo produced their sharing records from LEARN. The City is sharing all of their license plate scans from the readers that fan out all over the city with the San Diego sector of the Border Patrol.
This seems to be standard operating procedure for many Bay Area law enforcement agencies using the Vigilant system, despite sanctuary resolutions in place in many of them. We have previously reported that the nearby City of Richmond does the same, as well as the counties of Marin, San Mateo and Contra Costa.
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