Mayor Matt Mahan lent an extra pair of hands to put some of the first screws into a new automatic license plate reader camera at the intersection of King Road and Wilshire Boulevard, which city officials say will will function as an “extra pair of eyes” to oversee the neighborhood.
It’s the city’s 235th camera with Flock Safety’s Automatic License Plate Recognition, or ALPR, technology. Mahan said ALPR technology helped the city arrest about 200 suspects and recover $2 million worth of stolen vehicles last year. He also said he plans to expand the city’s network of Flock cameras to 500 by this summer.
“It’s home to a lot of seniors and families who want it to be safer and think this camera technology will help them,” Mahan said in Spanish about the area where the camera was installed.
Peter Ortiz, a San Jose council member representing District 5, said the intersection where the camera was installed has a high number of traffic collisions and hit-and-runs, and that this “extra set of eyes » will allow police to catch reckless drivers and reduce risks. criminal activity in East San Jose.
San Jose Police Chief Paul Joseph said he hopes the camera will deter people from committing crimes and make residents feel safe.
“No action taken by anyone will prevent crime,” Joseph said. “I hope there will be a deterrent effect when people realize that coming to San Jose or being in San Jose and committing a crime, the likelihood of being arrested is much greater with this use technology.”
Danny Garza, president of the Plata Arroyo neighborhood association, said East San Jose residents have been asking the city for more public safety measures in the area for 15 years. He said the city’s Strong Neighborhood Initiative, launched in 2000, had taught residents how to advocate for themselves in the face of a persistent crime problem.
“I’m proud for the community,” Garza said.
A combination of money from the city’s general fund, allocations from last year’s budget and a grant to combat organized retail theft was used to fund the city’s Flock camera network . Thomas said each camera costs $3,000 to operate each year.
Josh Thomas, Flock Safety’s senior vice president of policy and communications, said the new camera works through a combination of modern hardware and machine learning. The cameras are designed to take a photo of passing cars and capture the state and number on the license plate as well as the color, make and model of the car. Thomas said law enforcement can use a search function in Flock’s program to search with car characteristics to narrow down suspects’ vehicles.
Although ALPR technology is growing in popularity among Bay Area city officials, privacy advocates continue to voice concerns. Mike Katz-Lacabe, research director at Oakland Privacy, said what’s unique about San Jose’s network is that data is stored for a year — in other cities, like Oakland, it’s only kept for 28 days — which which increases the risk of information being exposed during a data breach.
In California in particular, there are concerns that stored data could be shared with agencies that target undocumented immigrants. Katz-Lacabe said that while there is a law in place to prevent California agencies from sharing information with out-of-state agencies, information can still be shared unofficially while police departments work with these agencies in joint working groups.
“If information is shared unofficially, there is a lack of accountability,” Katz-Lacabe said.
Katz-Lacabe encouraged drivers concerned about privacy issues to be aware of what their local governments are doing, learn about what ALPR cameras look like, and pressure officials to change the issues in their privacy policies.
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