When residents of a Ritzy West district experienced it an increase in burglaries last year, they decided to invest in technology to combat the problem.
The CHEVIOT HILLS district association – A community of houses with a million dollars has been sandwiched between Highway 10 and Century City – has collected more than $ 200,000 to buy dozens of high -tech controversial cameras that scan license plates.
Automated plates readers, as they are known, allow authorities to follow when vehicles of interest go through certain intersections. The devices can also be mounted on police cars, allowing the police to sweep data from data on the license plates while they drive. The police said that the gadgets help investigate stolen cars, locate the fugitives and resolve crimes by checking who came and came from a given day.
But when the community has donated cameras to the Los Angeles police foundation – one of the many non -profit organizations supporting the Los Angeles police service – they sent them with attached strings: the police were only allowed to use them in the CHEVIOT hills.
During the months that followed, the act of charity triggered discussions on which decides how the technology given to the LAPD is deployed – and if the data collected by the readers of the plate could be used for purposes far beyond the planned scope.
Critics have long warned of confidentiality problems because the cameras follow people without consent or mandate, collecting data on laws that are stored up to five years.
When Cheviot Hills donated plates scanning cameras to the Los Angeles Police Foundation – one of the many non -profit organizations that support the LAPD – they sent them with attached strings: the police were only allowed to use them in Cheviot Hills.
(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)
Since its creation over 25 years ago, the Los Angeles Police Foundation has channeled millions of unnamed donors at the LAPD. Sometimes the money pays for holidays or exercise equipment, but it was also used to acquire advanced police equipment and not covered technology in the annual budget of several billion dollars of the ministry.
The deputy chief of the LAPD, John McMahon, accused the police foundation of exceeding his limits with the donation of the plaque reader, according to sources which requested anonymity to avoid reprisals for having spoken of internal questions. McMahon opposed the limits of the place where the cameras could be used, indicated the sources, and also disputed the foundation pushing to buy the players of the plaque from a specific entrepreneur, a startup based in Atlanta called Flock Safety.
After McMahon questioned the donation of herd cameras in December, the member of the foundation board of directors, Jeffrey Neu, filed an internal complaint against him alleging a bias, the sources said.
Neu did not respond to a request for comments.
McMahon refused to discuss the current complaint, but said that the Times had good reasons to push the donation. The herds’ cameras, he said, are not completely compatible with the LAPD systems, including the emerging crime center in real time of the department, which monitors the intelligence collected throughout the city.
The department already uses plates readers from large companies Motorola Solutions and Axon, and McMahon said that there are strict rules on the duration of the data they collect, which can see it, and when. His contract with FLOCK data policies is slightly different, he said.
McMahon, who heads the LAPD information technology office, said the police should own and “keep total control of the data they collect and be able to use them” as law enforcement agencies seem appropriate “.
“Right now, sole proprietorship are trying to monopolize the business and prevent it from happening,” said McMahon. “It is not in the best interests of taxpayers.”
The police foundation did not respond to requests for information.
Holly Beilin, spokesperson for Flock Safety, said that the company had recently given the users of the police, including the LAPD, the possibility of more easily integrated FLOCK software with their systems. The ministry has already used herd cameras without problem, said Beilin, noting that the police can also access private devices with the owner’s permission.
For the file:
9:30 am April 10, 2025An earlier version of this story said FLOCK has made the source code available free of charge to the users of the police. This is not the case.
“There are more herds cameras in the Los Angeles metropolitan region than almost all other suppliers, and detectives use them regularly to resolve crime,” she said.
She added that in the context of the conditions of use of the company, customers who give their cameras to the police must respect Bill 34 of the Senate and other laws governing the sharing of license plate data.
The flock dispute made enough noise to draw more control from the Department’s civil surveillance committee, which said that it wanted to avoid a precedent where the technology of fighting crime is only going in areas that can afford it.
At a meeting earlier this year, members of the police committee voted to approve the donation of Cheviot Hills. The municipal council also signed to accept the cameras of the herd.
But surveillance officials demanded more information on the department’s overall strategy to deploy plates readers in other regions of the city.
LAPD officials told the commission that they currently had 1,500 police vehicles equipped with plates players and 160 other devices mounted on posts. The cameras, essentially a reinforced version of the technology used to perceive highway tolls, collect hundreds of thousands of plates each month.
The images of the plates are automatically executed through criminal databases and trigger alerts for officers in the field when they record a “blow”. Some suppliers say that new complementary modules can detect subtle changes in motorists’ behavior, such as a potential burglar “envelops” a house by surrounding the block in their car.
The ministry currently has an information sharing agreement with five other jurisdictions, which have all agreed that they would not share data with the federal immigration authorities.
The president of the Erroll Southers commission asked how LAPD chooses where readers are stationed and if the decisions “are influenced by donors”.
Most cameras are parked in the San Fernando valley, near the hot dots of the crime and critical infrastructure, as well as during the outings of the highway and ramps, replied CMDR. Gisselle Espinoza.
“It’s not random, it’s not cowardly Goosey, it’s not something capricious,” she said. “It’s very thoughtful.”
A point of contention with the cameras of Cheviot Hills is that the donation of the district to the foundation bypassing the city’s regular public market policy, which requires a process of submission and a verification of the sellers.
In a press release, the owners of Cheviot Hills Assn. said he preferred Flock “because of their stellar reputation and their high recommendation of the experts we have consulted.”
Cindy Kane, who sits on the board of directors of the neighborhood association, said that the residents have conferred on the police, their local municipal council office and other neighborhood associations before making their choice. A factor, said Kane, was that Beverlywood and other neighboring communities had already signed agreements with Flock.
“The Council discussed confidentiality problems in relation to being proactive to combat crime, which prevailed over the concerns of confidentiality problems,” she said. “We also determined that work with the police foundation was the most effective and effective way to obtain donations from our residents who could be assigned to this end.”
LAPD data shows that the burglaries in Cheviot Hills have doubled from 22 in 2023 to 45 in 2023, but other types of crime in the neighborhood are low compared to the rest of the city.
The perception of the public that crime is becoming uncontrollable – even if the statistics show that many cities are the safest they have been for decades – explains why readers of license plates have proliferated across the country.
Groups of civil freedoms, activists and certain academics have called more states to strengthen technology regulations, citing concerns about the overexploitation of colored communities, among other questions.
False positives – where the police wrongly identify a suspect based on a vehicle – are a risk, especially since the files of the stolen car database are sometimes obsolete. There are also concerns about the security of the data captured and which has access to it.
The absence of LAPD of an official data sharing agreement with FLOCK opens the door to the federal authorities to potentially request information from the company on the rental of an immigrant – undervaluating the city’s promise not to cooperate in the mass deportation campaign of the Trump administration, warned Tiff Guerra, an organizer with the activist group Stop Spying.
Group members and other criticisms regularly attend commission meetings and denounce the growing arsenal of predictive police software from the ministry, facial recognition and other technologies.
According to Guerra.
“Does that raise questions, like, who is monitored?” Who has the capacity to pay for this surveillance and who is able to pay these digital surveillance rings around their communities? ” Said Guerra.
But whether readers of the plaque are placed in southern Los Angeles or richer areas, police officials say that the concerns concerning mass monitoring of motorists are exaggerated.
LAPD DET. Alan Hamilton, who heads the LAPD detective office, said the department already had its hands fully trying to resolve crimes – there is simply not enough time or labor to start acting as Big Brother.
“My detectives are too busy just trying to follow the Jones,” said Hamilton.
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