Overview:
City Councilmembers Oscar Gutierrez and Meagan Harmon want to know whether contracts with firms doing business with the city protect residents
Two Santa Barbara City Council members say they want assurances that companies working for the city aren’t reselling or sharing peoples’ personal data with immigration authorities.
The request arises from concern about whether data collected from license-plate readers installed around the city might be shared with federal agencies.
Councilmember Oscar Gutierrez said he wanted to know if Flock Safety, which collects data from 12 license-plate cameras under a contract with the city, could be delivering data to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Based on a meeting with city staff members, “they seemed pretty confident” that such sharing with ICE is not allowed under the contract, he said.
Now Gutierrez and Councilmember Meagan Harmon want to go further. They want a comprehensive review of city contracts to make sure provisions are in place to prevent inappropriate sharing of information that could compromise privacy.
“I directed them to do an audit of all contractors,” Gutierrez told the News-Press, “to make sure they are not giving up or selling personal data of residents.”
Harmon said she plans to join him in the request because she wants to make sure that firms doing business with the city are adhering to the city’s no-sharing rules, including those outfits with parent companies.
Under council rules, a formal request on the issue is unlikely to surface in the council until February.
Santa Barbara’s police department is adamant about declaring it does not share data collected from license-plate readers, or as it refers to them, LPRs with ICE.
“I want to be very clear that the Santa Barbara Police Department does not share LPR data with federal immigration enforcement agencies or outside entities,” said Police Chief Kelly Gordon in a statement. “The data collected by our LPR cameras is owned and controlled by the city and SBPD, and access is governed by strict local and state laws, departmental policy, and contractual limitations.”
A state law governs who can access the data and the city has adopted a license plate reader policy.
The policy specifies that the information is only to be used for law-enforcement purposes, such as “routine patrol operation or criminal investigation” and limitations are put on who can access the data. It does say that it can be shared with other law-enforcement or prosecutorial agencies.
State law also limits how much police and sheriff’s departments can cooperate with federal immigration authorities on all matters. Still, CalMatters reported that police and sheriff’s agencies continue to pass data from license-plate readers over to ICE.
A group called Oakland Matters found 32 police agencies in Northern California that passed over license-plate information to immigration authorities. The Electronic Frontier Foundation listed 71 police agencies across the state that it discovered were also sharing. Santa Barbara, however, was not on either list.