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In a 3-2 vote, the Menlo Park City Council opted to move forward to develop a 2-year pilot program for automatic license plate readers throughout the city, after previously declining to consider the readers during a similar meeting last year due to privacy and efficacy concerns. The city would install 35 ALPRs through the city as part of the pilot. This reexamination of ALPRs comes after Menlo Park residents asked the city for help after a string of burglaries rocked the Sharon Heights neighborhood.
Mayor Cecilia Taylor and Council member Betsy Nash voted against moving forward with ALPRs, citing high cost, unproven efficacy and concerns about civil liberties. Vice Mayor Drew Combs and council members Jen Wolosin and Maria Doerr ultimately voted in favor of developing an ALPR pilot program with strong privacy guardrails, and taking a look at the program’s efficacy down the line.
“(We need to) balance the benefits versus the costs, but there certainly are costs and I do want to acknowledge that,” said Combs. “The rollout of this over I think a two year period I think is long enough for us to see some real sense of the value of this program … I am willing to, based on the recommendation of the chief, go down this road of exploring it and seeing the data.”
The Menlo Park Police Department has requested that 25-35 fixed ALPR cameras be installed in Menlo Park. Staff hasn’t yet proposed specific locations to install the readers.
Menlo Park Police Chief Dave Norris said that these devices are invaluable in solving a wide variety of crimes, such as homicides, thefts, missing persons cases and more. He said that the data is not yet conclusive on whether or not these cameras have a deterrent effect on crime, but that they would aid in case closure rates for the Menlo Park Police Department.
He also touted the nondiscriminatory nature of fixed ALPRs, saying “they’re just pulling data in a location, that is about as unbiased as you can get in terms of the collection of that data.”
The Flock ALPR camera system reads license plates and gathers information such as color, make and model of cars that pass through the roads where they are installed. The data gathered by the system can then be cross-checked with lists of vehicles that are suspected to be involved in crimes, and can be searched by police officers over the course of an investigation.
Norris said that the data will be stored by Flock for 30 days, and then by the Northern California Regional Intelligence Center for six months.
These readers will be installed through a contract with Flock Safety, a security company that provides police departments and other safety authorities with ALPRs. Many other nearby municipalities, such as Atherton, Portola Valley and Woodside, already use Flock to provide ALPR services.
The installation of the 35 new Flock ALPRs would initially cost the city $133,250 — $105,000 for the cameras themselves, $20,750 for professional services implementation fees, and $7,500 for the first year of the Flock advanced search operating system. The ongoing cost of the system would be $112,500 annually for camera maintenance and the search operating system. This number has come down from a previous quote of $284,900 for initial installation and $251,000 for ongoing system costs.
The Menlo Park Police Department has already been operating ALPRs in Menlo Park since 2014 in the form of mobile readers mounted on police patrol cars. Currently, license plate data retention is controlled by city ordinance and restricted to six months of retention.
MPPD is also already in agreement with Flock Safety for access to Flock ALPR information sharing with other agencies that already employ ALPRs, and has been since 2022.
Eight community members spoke in favor of bringing ALPRs to Menlo Park, saying that it would help them feel safer in their communities. Many residents said that the protective benefits of the cameras outweigh privacy concerns.
“I recognize the potential for abuse and violation of privacy, but I do believe that those are outweighed by the benefits that we can expect to see by both publicizing that the technology is in use and by their effectiveness in tracking down perpetrators and prosecuting them and getting them off the streets,” said Sharon Heights Community Association member Derek Marsano.
San Mateo County District Attorney Steve Wagstaffe also spoke in favor of installing the devices: “For me, that balance weighs in favor of protecting the public, but with very tight strictures on data. I think you then solve that balancing act in favor of both public safety and individual rights.”
Residents also voiced concerns that Menlo Park would be the only municipality in the area to shun ALPRs as a safety solution, thereby attracting crime to the city. Up until now, Menlo Park and East Palo Alto are two of the only cities along the Peninsula that have declined to install ALPRs.
“It’s as though Menlo Park is hanging out an open for business sign by not deploying this technology,” said Marsano.
Two other residents spoke against the installation of ALPRs, citing concerns regarding data collection and retention practices, implicit bias and the actual efficacy of the technology.
“The widespread scanning of license plates inevitably involves a collection of data from individuals who are not suspected of any crime,” said Menlo Park resident Soody Tronson. “The retention of such data can lead to situations where innocent people and events are tracked and stored potentially for years.”
A resident named Randy agreed, saying, “this data … has already been used to track Black Lives Matter. It is highly invasive. It can track where you’re going, tie in who you associate with, what medical facilities that you go to for reproductive rights, or places of worship.”
Nash shared similar concerns.
“I just do not feel comfortable being part of the surveillance state,” she said.
‘I just do not feel comfortable being part of the surveillance state.’
Menlo park council member betsy nash
Nash is also worried about the lack of data proving that these cameras actually prevent crime.
“We’re seeing in local communities that have adopted these cameras, that there is still crime going on there. There’s still residential burglaries,” she said. “I just pulled up a report from Woodside that they are now adding cameras. They’re adding two more because they still are having problems.”
Taylor was hesitant about the fact there is only one provider of ALPRs that the city is considering. The Menlo Park Police Department is seeking a sole-source procurement for the Flock ALPR technology.
Nash agreed, saying, “it seems like it’s a bottomless pit of expense. We are putting public safety in the hands of private companies that can raise rates whenever they want to. And the evidence shows that the rates have gone up rapidly as this has been adopted by other cities.”
Despite privacy and cost concerns, Wolosin, Doerr and Combs ultimately voted to have the police develop a plan to install ALPRs throughout the city.
“I want to acknowledge that my position is changing from the last time we had this conversation,” said Doerr. “I had a lot of the same questions that been brought up here … members of the public about the efficacy of the tool, concerns about the private contracts and the increasing costs through each negotiation cycle, and privacy … but I’m thinking about how this is this is a tool that the police chief and his department is recommending, as one tool among others that they feel would help their investigative efforts and help them do the work they need to do to keep our community safe.”
However, there was no majority of council members that could agree on a length of time that the data from ALPRs should be stored in the Flock and NCRIC databases. Doerr and Wolosin advocated for looking at the possibility of only storing data for 30 days in both databases, while Combs said that he did not see a significant difference between storing the data for 30 days and six months.
“It’s not clear that retaining (the data) for six months or a year or 30 days is somehow a higher risk event,” he said. “I would defer to the recommendation (of the police department). Because I don’t have a really clear point of logic where I could say that 30 days somehow presents less of a risk profile than six months.”
Wolosin added that she wants the police department to revisit data storage policies for the mobile ALPRs that are currently in use, saying “I also would like to see a narrowing of the policy to 30 days for both the Flock system and our mobile system.”
Though the council ultimately voted to move forward with developing an ALPR program, council members emphasized that the city and police department should keep privacy top of mind. They asked that the question of how long the Menlo Park police are allowed to hold on to ALPR data be brought back to council at a later date.
The question of specific locations for the devices will also return to the council at a future meeting, though Norris said that the ALPRs would be focused on the city’s entry and exit points.
The City Council asked Norris and city staff to bring back a proposal for an updated data retention ordinance and for more discussion on the specifics of the data retention policy.
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No one has a right to privacy in public. That is well established law, so people’s concerns about privacy are unfounded. We have no privacy as soon as we walk out our door.