The Santa Barbara City Council on Tuesday will discuss the termination of its contract with Flock Safety amid national backlash and concerns over privacy vulnerabilities.
Though it won’t be the end of automatic license plate readers in Santa Barbara.
While the city’s contract with Flock Safety has ended, the city will propose a replacement to the cameras from a different company: Verkada.
Verkada, a California based security company, is the expected new provider of the automatic license plate readers. The City Council is set to vote on Tuesday at its 2 p.m. meeting.
City Councilmember Meagan Harmon told the News-Press that she has a “deep discomfort” with surveillance cameras such as Flock Safety ones.
“However, cameras in general have been a hugely important tool in our ability to open and close criminal cases and quite literally solve crimes,” Harmon said. “I’m very glad that the community conversation is happening, there are real costs and consequences with video surveillance but there are also huge benefits.”
She said that the new proposal involving Verkada is an improvement from the Flock Safety cameras.
“Opposed to the Flock contract, which was externally arranged, all of our footage now will be held within our own system. To me that is quite a meaningful difference,” Harmon said.
What is Verkada?
With headquarters in San Mateo, California, and regional hubs in nine other U.S. cities, Verkada offers a variety of security services. The company also has international offices in eight countries including Australia, Taiwan, and Poland.
Verkada’s camera technology uses artificial intelligence to aid its security systems.
AI is used to “locate footage of suspects or vehicles in seconds with powerful AI analytics,” wrote the company in their product description for “Smart solutions for city and county security”.
The company recently announced Hard Rock Stadium, home of the Miami Dolphins, will bring Verkada cameras, an alert system, and alarms to their home stadium in Miami, Florida.
Filip Kaliszan is the Chief Executive Officer and co-founder of Verkada, which was founded in 2016. The company has four founders, three of whom founded the class-planning company CourseRank in 2007, before selling it to the now bankrupt edtech company Chegg.
Verkada Chairman Hans Robertson was previously the co-founder of Meraki, and began his career as an business analyst at McKinsey & Co.
Verkada had internal controversy in 2020 when the company’s own security cameras, inside their own office, were reportedly used to harass female coworkers via the camera’s facial recognition systems. The company initially didn’t fire the employees involved, but then changed their decision and terminated the offenders.
Customers of Verkada include the city of San Luis Obispo, Los Angeles, The Riviera Ridge School, Grand Canyon University, Canva and the Los Angeles Rams.
Cost and Concerns
The city of Santa Barbara would pay $56,810.09 for the purchase and license of the 12 Verkada CB53 Outdoor LPR cameras. The cost would be covered by the police department budget.
It will cost $6,000 to remove the current 12 Flock Safety cameras located throughout Santa Barbara.
The Santa Barbara County Sheriff’s Office operates their own network of Flock Safety cameras which includes the ones positioned near San Marcos High School and in unincorporated areas of the county. City Council’s decision will not impact those cameras.
The Verkada CB53 cameras capture and store high quality video using a 5 mega-pixel sensor that can record at 24 frames per second. The software that comes with the cameras has the capability for facial recognition. The system uses cloud-based storage.
According to Verkada’s datasheet on the CB53, the camera uses AI-powered search features for vehicle analytics, people analytics and for alerts.
In the city council report, Sgt. Bruno Petersen of the Santa Barbara Police Department, wrote:
“Verkada’s LPR platform only captures license plate images and associated vehicle characteristics using purpose-built cameras.”
Dr. Giovanni Vigna, a distinguished professor of Computer Science at UC Santa Barbara who specializes in surveillance and vulnerability assessment research, told the News-Press that a camera is just a sensor that captures what it sees.
“A camera gets a picture, how you post process it has nothing to do with the camera,” Vigna said.
Post processing refers to the data that is then collected and stored, such as license plates and vehicle characteristics.
The Santa Barbara Police Department and Verkada did not respond to comment about whether the license plate capture technology will detect faces and record people analytics in Santa Barbara.
Vigna expressed concern with having any sort of camera network.
“The moment you create a network, someone can hop from one place to another,” said Vigna.
With a network, someone isn’t being tracked in just one location, but their movements can be tracked and watched across multiple locations.
Councilmember Harmon said that to her knowledge, immigration enforcement has never requested to see Flock camera data from the Santa Barbara Police Department and that the city wouldn’t comply with requests if they did come.
If law enforcement agencies want to build trust with the public regarding surveillance cameras, Vigna said they need to present measurable positive results such as decreased crime rates in the areas with cameras.
Furthermore, Vigna said that the public needs to know what measures are in place to protect the data the cameras collect, and those safeguards need to show that law enforcement have the proper technological expertise to be handling the data.
Vigna said that there can be value to having surveillance, such as at airports, but it depends on the context.
“Having surveillance for the sake of surveillance, I think, is wrong,” he said.
