^{Thumbnail photo courtesy of AS Photography, which has been edited.}

The Eureka City Council will be voting today at 6pm on whether or not to install 21 automated license-plate reading (ALPR) cameras throughout the city. There are also considerations to introduce these cameras into Arcata, Fortuna, and on the Cal Poly Humboldt campus, according to an article from the Lost Coast Outpost’s Isabella Vanderheiden.

These ALPR cameras are provided by Flock Technology, a private company specializing in AI-based visual surveillance systems. According to the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a nonprofit organization dedicated to defending civil liberties in the digital world, ALPR cameras can capture license plate numbers as well as identifying details of any passing vehicle, such as make, model, color, physical damage, bumper stickers, and more—so-called “vehicle fingerprints” that enable easier tracking. It does this, Flock claims, in order to compare license plate numbers against stolen vehicles or individuals wanted on criminal charges.

This story first hit back in October, when Eureka Police Department Police Chief Brian Stephens presented the ALPR draft policy. Stephens explained at the Oct. 1 City Council meeting, “We will be able to locate vehicles associated with crimes committed in our region quicker. We can use this technology as an investigative tool to further investigations after a crime has been committed within our city, give our investigators quicker leads and reduce the time a suspect is potentially on the loose to victimize others in our community.”

The response from the City Council was of concern, namely for violations of privacy and data sharing. As such, they decided to table the conversation “until the City Attorney’s office and the city’s COPP [Community Oversight on Police Practices] board had a chance to review the ALPR policy,” Vanderheiden wrote in October’s article.

This tabling was likely the reason that — although the comments on the Outpost‘s October article predominantly stood against anything to do with ALPR — this story didn’t appear to attract lasting attention from the general public.

But now, after the Community Oversight on Police Practices (COPP) has looked it over, the time has come: ALPR cameras are back on the table.

Though the Outpost‘s reporting has focused primarily on the council, police department, and happenings of these meetings (which is far from a slight, and we recommend reading both the October and recent articles for a thorough rundown of this situation from the start), the response of the community has not been reported on.

^{These slides have been shared on various social media pages calling for an “Urgent Phone Zap” to Eureka City Council Members.}

Almost immediately after the release of the Outpost’s latest article, published January 31st, a number of concerned citizens took to social media to rally against implementing ALPR cameras in Humboldt County. One post from @foodnotbombsarcata on Instagram contained the three above slides, captioned, “Phone Zap! Call or email city council members BEFORE TUESDAY to tell them to vote no on bringing AI surveillance Flock cameras to Humboldt County.”

Other accounts have also shared the following flier:

Of course, even without publicly engaging with the community, the Eureka Police Department has supported—and defended—integrating these cameras throughout Eureka.

For starters, Flock’s Community Affairs Manager Jonathan Paz claimed that San Marino, a city in Los Angeles County, has seen a “70 percent decrease in residential burglaries” after increasing the number of ALPR cameras in the city, the Outpost reported in October. However, Police Chief John Incontro of the San Marino Police Department has discredited that statistic outright. He told Forbes in an article published that the statistic wasn’t accurate.

“I definitely need to talk to their marketing folks,” Incontro said. 

In fact, the article states, “In 2019, San Marino reported 60 residential burglaries. In 2023, three years after Flock’s arrival, there were 63 — a 5 percent increase.” Meanwhile, the rates of other serious crimes such as larceny and murder have remained the same as when they started.

Furthermore, this is only one verified instance in which Flock has made a similarly wrongful claim. It’s not even the only case mentioned in the Forbes article (which, for the record, is an article titled, “Flock Installed AI Cameras In This Small City And Claimed Crime Went Down. It Went Up.” An interesting read if you live in a place where there are already or may soon be Flock’s cameras.) Another claim said Dayton, Ohio experienced a rate of crime reduction by 43% over 2 years after Flock installation, when in reality that pattern crime reduction began 1 year and 8 months prior to said installation, according to the Forbes article. Likewise, Flock has claimed a decrease in violent crime by 22 percent in Fort Worth, Texas since installations, when in reality violent crime has increased by 5 percent, according to the same article.

Wanna know a number that is accurate? Flock’s cameras are currently tracking 70 percent of the United States population. That might seem like a number intended to scare you, but no, CEO Garrett Langley touts this as a positive. In a video interview with a16z (an organization that describes itself as a “venture capital firm that invests in software eating the world,” according to its YouTube Channel’s about section) Langley said Flock’s cameras are “live in just over 4,000 US cities, so that’s almost 70 percent of the U.S. population that’s covered by Flock.”

However, this is also where you run into the defense that boils down to just how safe Flock cameras supposedly are. “None of your personal data is actually being stored,” Paz says. This information is limited, and used solely by the Eureka Police Department, protected by a contract with the city, and will never be used by outside agencies, et cetera, et cetera. This claim would, of course, be easier to believe if it weren’t for the fact that civil liberties groups have already demanded that the Humboldt County Sheriff’s Department stop sharing drivers’ location data with police in anti-abortion states.

That’s right, Humboldt County has already utilized ALPR cameras—granted, on a far smaller scale than the current conversation. According to a mid-2023 North Coast Journal article, “The Humboldt County Sheriff’s Office only has one automated license-plate reader, or ALPR, which was affixed to a patrol car last year and used for about 12 months by three deputies who were trained to use the technology as a pilot program, according to spokesperson Samantha Karges.” 

Though this is by no means up to the same scale as the 21 ALPR cameras planned to be added throughout the city of Eureka, this lone ALPR camera still managed to create security and safety issues. “According to documents released to the ACLU and EFF in response to a records request, the technology read 244,457 license plates from January to November of 2022, registering 4,220 ‘hits,’ or plates that were flagged and on some sort of watch list. That information — documenting exactly when and where almost a quarter of a million cars were spotted in Humboldt County — was then automatically uploaded to a database accessible by more than 400 agencies throughout the country, from Texas and Louisiana to New Jersey and New England,” the article further explains.

Alongside the ease of access due to the automatic uploads, Flock, in the case of subpoena, will comply in handing over data to other law enforcement agencies. In an article from the Oakland County Times, Ferndale (the one in Michigan) Mayor Pro Tem Kat Bruner James shared her concerns during a council meeting. “One serious concern that we really don’t have a solution for is uses by other law enforcement agencies that aren’t permitted by our policy and don’t align with our values. There’s really no way that we can resist subpoenas, court orders, etcetera for agencies who are criminalizing poverty and seeking disadvantaged people,” she said.

This is a lot of scary information to throw at you. We could continue to pelt you with numbers, and articles, and any number of reasons why this is a big deal for the city of Eureka, if not Humboldt County at large. We could tell you about Flock’s law-breaking unpermitted installations, or the known errors Flock’s cameras make that have caused innocents to be wrongfully and violently confronted by police. But eventually a wall of text and links becomes just that.

So, what’s a concerned citizen to do? For one, answer the call to call Eureka City Councilmembers. There’s still ample opportunity to let Councilmembers know exactly what you think about ALPR cameras before today’s meeting (and if you’re shy, there’s even a handy script you can read off.)

Beyond that: show up. The Eureka City Council will be meeting tonight, 6pm, at Eureka City Hall, 531 K Street. Remember: if you’re easy to ignore, they will ignore you—so make sure they see you, and enlighten them on the place you believe ALPR cameras have in our community.