State AG hopes El Cajon lawsuit will settle privacy debate on license plate readers

The state’s top cop is hoping a lawsuit against a small police agency in San Diego County will finally settle a debate about privacy, and whether out-of-state or federal agencies can access California drivers’ location data. 

State Attorney General Rob Bonta filed a lawsuit against the city of El Cajon, its police department and police chief, alleging that officials have jeopardized the privacy and safety of residents by illegally sharing sensitive location data with law enforcement agencies across the country.

“To protect public safety, you need public trust,” Bonta said in a statement. “As the Trump Administration continues to target California’s immigrant communities, it is important that state and local law enforcement are not seen as a tool in furthering the President’s mass deportation agenda.”

El Cajon city and police officials declined to comment on pending litigation. But in a statement, El Cajon police Chief Jeremiah Larson said: 

“Cooperation among law enforcement agencies has been a cornerstone of effective policing since modern policing was established in the United States. Today, that collaboration is strengthened through advanced data-sharing platforms that allow departments to exchange critical information instantly, eliminating the need for time-consuming phone calls and dramatically increasing investigative efficiency. Data sharing and interagency cooperation keeps our communities safer.”

They’re called automated license plate readers. For more than a decade, police agencies across the country have been using cameras mounted on top of patrol cars, or fixed objects such as light poles, to capture any license plate that comes into view. They extract and store the time, date, location and sometimes an image of the vehicle, and automatically compare the plate number to a list of vehicles that police are looking for. It’s a powerful tool that can assist law enforcement with identifying people who commit crime. 

Police officials consistently point to success stories of various crimes solved with the help of this technology, including homicide, robbery and even child abduction. Last month, El Cajon police touted a hit-and-run arrest with the help of community tips and license plate readers.

But activists call it an indiscriminate data collection effort that, when pieced together, gives the government an unrestricted view into the daily routines and social networks of drivers — from where they go to who they spend their time with. 

That’s why state lawmakers in 2015 strengthened privacy protections for drivers and established strict rules for how police can use the technology, which includes keeping this private information inside the state of California. 

An inewsource investigation in 2022 revealed half of San Diego County’s 10 law enforcement agencies had been sharing license plate data with other agencies across the United States. Former state Sen. Jerry Hill, a Democrat from San Mateo who sponsored the privacy law, told inewsource it was exactly what lawmakers tried to prevent.

“Law enforcement certainly has a tough job and we want them to succeed at their job and their mission, but how they get there needs some serious civilian oversight,” Hill said in a previous interview with inewsource, “or we could have a police state at the end of the day.”

In 2022, El Cajon was not one of the five agencies sharing license plate data out-of-state. It was contracting with a different company, known as Vigilant Solutions, and only using the data internally. 

According to the lawsuit, El Cajon is now working with Flock Safety, which manages a transparency portal. El Cajon’s transparency profile says the department has granted access to dozens of other agencies across the country — from Washington to New York to Florida. 

El Cajon police Lt. Nick Sprecco gave two examples of how sharing information with out-of-state agencies helped apprehend suspects — one in Florida and another in Texas.

The California Department of Justice contacted El Cajon’s police chief about the department’s handling of license plate data, the lawsuit says.

“Despite this and subsequent outreach, El Cajon Police Department and City of El Cajon have refused to cease its unlawful practice of sharing (automated license plate reader) data with out-of-state agencies,” the lawsuit says.

It’s not the first time public officials have disagreed on how to handle data collected from this technology. Some have argued the law — Senate Bill 34 — actually allows sharing this data with out-of-state agencies. When pressed about its data-sharing practice in 2022, Escondido’s city attorney said a “public agency” as defined within the law would include police agencies in other states. That’s an assertion the attorney general and the law’s sponsor disagree with. Escondido changed its practice.

The issue has gone to court before. The Marin County Sheriff settled with the American Civil Liberties Union over its handling of license plate data. As part of the agreement, Marin County and Sheriff Robert Doyle agreed to only share drivers’ location data with other law enforcement agencies in California and to pay $49,000 in attorney fees. 

Bonta is hoping the lawsuit against El Cajon will end the debate for good.

“We’re asking a court to put this issue to bed and definitively affirm that California law prohibits the sharing of license plate data with federal and out-of-state agencies,” he said in a statement.