The Berkeley City Council is scheduled to vote on July 25th to install hundreds of thousands of dollars of Automated License Plate Reader equipment (ALPRs) across Berkeley, in the hope of deterring auto thefts and violent crime.
The proposal specifies a two year test period for the equipment, but fails to specify any parameters or methodology for the test, nor any criteria for success or failure. As such, this will not be a scientific test, it is flimflam, smoke-and-mirrors: a procedure that guarantees “success” defined after-the-fact regardless of reality.
But this is not the worst of it. A massive, nationwide test of ALPR efficacy has already been conducted, spanning the last decades. And it failed.
As the original ALPR installation proposal by Berkeley Councilperson Taplin notes “The use of ALPR technology has increased significantly in law enforcement agencies across the US in the past decade…” (https://berkeleyca.gov/sites/default/files/documents/2023-07-25%20Item%2038a%20Surveillance%20Ordinance%20Items.pdf, page 17 of the PDF)
Very few ALPRs were deployed prior to a decade ago, while over the last decade large numbers of them have been installed. If they had a deterrent effect, then, one should see it in nationwide crime statistics. If nothing else, auto thefts should be going down significantly over the last decade as more and more ALPRs have been deployed. But this is simply not the case.
As you can see by the Statista graph below (https://www.statista.com/statistics/191216/reported-motor-vehicle-theft-rate-in-the-us-since-1990/), compiled from FBI data, while the auto theft rate declined quite a bit in the decades from 1991 to 2011, it declined not at all – in fact, it has risen – in the last decade!
(With respect to violent crime, the graph is very similar, with such crime rising somewhat in the last decade: https://www.statista.com/statistics/191219/reported-violent-crime-rate-in-the-usa-since-1990/)
It is clear that the mass deployment of ALPR technology across the country has not reduced the auto theft rate, the very thing that the Berkeley Police Department (rightly) points out as having increased significantly in Berkeley and wants (again, rightly) to do something about. Therefore BPD’s proposed test, even if it were conducted scientifically, is redundant – the test of ALPR efficacy has already been conducted, on a massive scale, involving hundreds of millions of cars, thousands of ALPRs and across decades of results.
No test Berkeley could conceivably conduct would have anywhere near as much statistical significance.
Nonetheless this is their proposed “solution,” one that the data suggests will be an expensive failure and a waste of resources. Not only that but it will be a danger to our civil liberties as BPD tracks our comings and goings, storing the data in a massive cloud database subject not only to hackery but subpoenas from Red States intent on prosecuting their residents should they dare to come to California to exercise their reproductive and medical rights (e.g. https://tennesseelookout.com/2023/07/18/tennessee-ag-asserts-right-to-out-of-state-abortion-transgender-care-medical-records/)
This is no solution. The Berkeley City Council should reject this proposal on the basis of science, reason, cost and our rights under the 4th amendment.