The City of Arvin’s Chief of Police Alex Ghazalpour proposed installing 18 Flock cameras around the city to Arvin’s City Council. His goal is to use these Flock cameras as a tool to improve public safety.
Proposal overview from Arvin BP:
- What: Install 18 Flock Safety Falcon cameras on a two-year subscription.
- Cost: Approximately $109,000.
- Purpose: Enhance public safety and crime-solving capabilities in Arvin.
Use the cameras’ advanced technology to quickly identify and address crime-related incidents, what Ghazalpour described as “game-changing technology.”
Ghazalpour reassured residents that he, as the chief, controls who accesses the data and that it wouldn’t be shared with immigration authorities.
“I get to choose department-wise on who I am sharing this information with. The sharing of this information is in a secure network, right, and it is deleted every 30 days,” Ghazalpour explained.
During the last few council meetings residents shared they felt that the cameras are a threat to their privacy, particularly for vulnerable populations like immigrants, Latinos, and farmworkers. They worry about how the collected data might be misused by private entities, law enforcement, jails, or other authorities. Specifically, they worried that data collected by the cameras might be shared with agencies like Border Patrol or ICE, potentially targeting immigrant communities.
“It is extremely dangerous to have this high-tech surveillance in a city where the majority are immigrants, Latinos, and farmworkers. This data can be accessed by private entities, jails, or prisons. Our entire identities are at risk,” said a local advocate, amplifying the voices of those who feel ignored or at risk because of the cameras.
“Arvin is a small community. People don’t have to be caged in like rats by cameras,” said a community resident.
While many were against the proposal, there were some residents who supported the proposal, arguing they could deter crime and help provide justice to victims of violence.
“I don’t know how many people have had their family members killed here in Arvin. I know there’s a couple. And I believe that they would want their family to have justice,” said a community resident who supported the proposal.
Last December, the ACLU of Southern California sent a letter to the Arvin City Council outlining serious concerns about the proposed partnership with Flock Safety for Automatic License Plate Recognition (ALPR) technology and asked the council to reject the proposed agreement.
According to the ACLU, ALPR systems often allow immigration authorities, such as ICE, to access data, which could lead to targeting undocumented immigrants.
“ICE can tap into an ALPR system’s nationwide database of license plates and associated location records for the purposes of targeting immigrants while they are driving to work, running errands, or bringing their kids to school,” the ACLU said in the letter.
The ACLU also cited two examples where errors in ALPR systems that eventually led to wrongful arrests or detentions, particularly impacting minority groups.
In an incident in San Francisco referenced by the ACLU, a black woman was wrongfully detained at gunpoint because an ALPR system mistakenly flagged her car as stolen. The error happened because the ALPR system relied on outdated or incorrect information, which led to a civil rights lawsuit.
Another incident that happened because of an ALPR technology error was in Contra Costa County. The Sheriff’s Department’s ALPR system caused the wrongful arrest of two men, including the chair of Oakland’s Privacy Advisory Commission, because the rental car they were driving was mistakenly flagged as stolen. The car had been reported stolen months earlier but was recovered, and the information wasn’t updated in the system. This error led to the men being detained at gunpoint, which showed how ALPR technology can fail when records aren’t kept current, according to the ACLU’s letter.
“ALPR system failures have dangerous consequences and may result in liability for the City…” said in the letter to Arvin’s city council. “Flock’s technology is not as secure or as unique in this space as it claims—rather, Flock runs a proprietary, secretive network that shares 500 million scans of vehicles a month. Because Flock connects a massive network of connected license plate readers and cameras operated by private entities like homeowners’ associations, it functionally creates a broad surveillance network across the state and even the country.”
