Stockton officials hope the installation of about 100 license plate readers on the city’s streets will make it easier to track down criminals.
The Stockton City Council on Tuesday approved a resolution to accept $963,000 in federal funds that will be used in part for the program.
License plate readers alert police to stolen vehicles and cars suspected to have been used in crimes. Though some groups, including the American Civil Liberties Union, have raised concerns, issues of privacy didn’t surface at the meeting.
Rather, the council, in its unanimous vote, indicated it sees automated readers as an important tool in fighting crime.
“This is a step in the right direction,” Councilmember Michele Padilla said.
When one of the new license plate readers registers a vehicle of interest to police, it will send an alert to a monitoring center, which can then use other cameras already in place around the city to determine where the vehicle is headed, Police Capt. Kyle Pierce said.
No decision has been made yet about where the readers will be installed. Pierce told the council the decision will be based on historical crime data and advice from detectives.
“We’re going to look at all the crime stats to see where we are seeing an increase in violent crime and property crime,” Pierce said.
In July, Rep. Josh Harder, D-Tracy, took credit for obtaining the grant, saying that the technology is needed to keep families safe. The same announcement included a statement from Stockton police, saying, “License plate reader technology is a staple of the modern law enforcement agency toolbox, and this investment will impact community safety for years to come.”
The ACLU, however, in a 2013 report on license plate readers described them as intrusive to average citizens.
“The implementation of automatic license plate readers poses serious privacy and other civil liberties threats,” the report states. “More and more cameras, longer retention periods, and widespread sharing allow law enforcement agents to assemble the individual puzzle pieces of where we have been over time into a single, high-resolution image of our lives.”
The issue is expected to return to the City Council for purchase of the cameras. No prospective vendor was named, though, the Manteca/Ripon Bulletin reported in 2022 that its police department, along with those in Tracy and Ripon, uses systems made by Atlanta-based Flock Safety.