Santa Barbara once again backed away from partnering with a new surveillance company, during a tense and heated meeting Tuesday.
The city had intended to enter a contract with Verkada, but the council instead voted 5-2 to conduct a review of the city’s controversial Automatic License Plate Reader policy before moving forward. The process is estimated to take at least a year.
Mayor Randy Rowse and Councilmember Mike Jordan opposed the deferment. Both Rowse and Jordan expressed concerns over how long the review would take and the resulting delay in the implementation of the cameras.
“Clearly we have more work to do,” Councilmember Mike Jordan said. Though Jordan said a year is a “horrible” amount of time to take the tool away from the police department. He wanted to shorten the public outreach timeline.
The meeting featured multiple tense exchanges, particularly over the use of artificial intelligence.
Members of the public who spoke raised concerns about how AI would be used in the surveillance. During one moment toward the end of the meeting, some members of the audience laughed when Police Chief Kelly Gordon said “there’s some AI on the backend of the software.”
Rowse chimed in and said “Can we have a little civility out there, please?”
He suggested that he could also “clear the room” and finish up “without everybody,” before asking again for a “civil hearing.”
A member of the audience said “you show civility first.”
That comment prompted Rowse to whisper, with his microphone still on, “Shut the f__k up.” The expletive was audible on the City TV broadcast.
None of the other council members addressed the comments from the audience or Rowse’s comment.
The tension spotlighted the deep emotions surrounding Flock cameras and surveillance.
At the end of August, the City of Santa Barbara cancelled their contract with Flock Safety. The Santa Barbara Police Department was operating 12 Flock cameras across the city but those cameras were removed and the department no longer has access to the data.
The department proposed replacing the Flock cameras with 12 Verkada cameras, citing that Verkada allows the city to control and own the data collected from the cameras—providing more security than Flock.
Concerns, solutions and next steps
Verkada openly advertises that their camera software uses artificial intelligense to aid in detection and surveillance.
Councilmember Kristen Sneddon expressed concern with incorporating artificial intelligence into surveillance in Santa Barbara.
“Nothing about surveillance is simple now,” Sneddon said. “This really isn’t about our police department, it’s about the potential uses outside of our police department.”
Councilmember Oscar Gutierrez wants to bring activist organizations, such as Indivisible Santa Barbara, in on the discussion about automatic license plate reader policies.
City Attorney John Doimas told the council, in response to a question from Councilmember Eric Friedman, that no matter what policy they create regarding the collection and storage of license plate reader data, a warrant from a judge could still overrule it.
This means that even if the city opted to run an entirely in-house automatic license plate reader system, the data could still be accessed by the federal government—provided that there were a warrant.
One possible alternative to license plate readers is CCTV, which is a more common type of security recording. Police Chief Gordon told the City Council that CCTV would require real time monitoring. That would in turn require a restructuring of staffing to accommodate the live monitoring.
Gordon, in an effort to ease concerns, told the City Council that how they buy the Verkada camera dictates how the camera operates.
“If we buy the camera as an [License plate reader] camera, we don’t have the ability to switch the technology on it to make it something else,” Gordon said.
The department would purchase the cameras solely as license plate readers, without the ability for people detection and facial recognition.
The next stage of the process is to conduct public outreach to gather input on the policy. Gordon told the City Council that there is the potential to bring in a Verkada representative at a future meeting to discuss more about the technology.
