Oakland police can continue relying on cameras that record vehicles’ license plate information to investigate crimes, but not without additional oversight and restrictions.
After a contentious hearing, the City Council on Tuesday unanimously agreed to new policies that will reduce how long police store the data they collect — from two years to six months. The department will also be required to submit quarterly reports detailing each instance where police officers accessed the available data.
The new rules are a compromise — drawn up by Councilwoman Sheng Thao — between the police department and the city-formed Privacy Advisory Commission, which originally had sought to halt use of the technology altogether.
“We have an agreement to improve public safety and protect the public’s privacy,” Thao said. “We have to keep our residents safe, full-stop.”
License plate reading cameras are nothing new. Oakland has used them since the early 2010s, and earlier this year several other East Bay cities began mounting their own gadgets around town to snuff out stolen cars and suspects in violent crimes.
But any decision involving Oakland police carries higher stakes, especially after a recent stretch that saw four homicides over a single 18-hour span and a school shooting that left six people wounded with the suspects still at large.
Privacy experts argue there’s little evidence to suggest the cameras actually reduce crime. And they criticize Oakland police for not being more transparent about a program that amounts to mass surveillance of the city’s streets.
Brian Hofer, who chairs the city’s Privacy Advisory Commission, went as far as to file a lawsuit last year against Oakland police to force the release of more public records that detail how the cameras are being used.
At Tuesday’s meeting, Hofer displayed some of those records. They reveal that officers typically request license plate data within days or a few weeks of the crimes being investigated. That’s evidence, Hofer said, of the department needlessly hanging on to data for much longer than needed.
“I believe Oaklanders deserve better, and we deserve honesty,” Hofer said. “You can’t have it both ways by claiming that crime is out of control in Oakland, and that [license plate readers] will immediately reduce and deter future crime. And I’m saying this because the technology is already in place.”
Police, on the other hand, say the cameras allow officers to focus more on violent crimes and make fewer traffic stops to investigate them.
“In no way do we want to violate anyone’s rights,” Police Chief LeRonne Armstrong said at the meeting. “We just simply want to work in a collaborative fashion … to help address crime in the city of Oakland.”
Ahead of Tuesday’s meeting, the chief found support from council members Loren Taylor and Treva Reid, who along with Thao are running to succeed Mayor Libby Schaaf in the November election.
Taylor and Reid earlier this month were featured prominently in a city press release that described the new camera policies as efforts to “combat the city’s growing public safety crisis.”
But Hofer, during the meeting, accused the mayoral candidates of posturing for the public in order to win votes, suggesting that Taylor and Reid misled the public to believe the city’s license plate readers are brand-new technology.
In response, Taylor credited himself and Reid for forcing the council to bring the new policies to a vote, saying the dispute between police and privacy officials had become “suppressed at the committee level.”
Reid, meanwhile, said she would not address “political foolishness.”
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