California AG Sues City of El Cajon for Allegedly Sharing License Plate Data

Attorney General Rob Bonta said it would be "naive" to think information from El Cajon's license-plate scanners had not made it into the hands of federal immigration enforcement officials.

California Attorney General Rob Bonta on Friday sued the San Diego County city of El Cajon, accusing its police department of illegally sharing collected license plate information with out-of-state agencies.

The suit, filed in San Diego County Superior Court, said El Cajon makes available license plate images scanned locally by a computer system to law enforcement agencies in 26 states via a private company, Flock Safety. Such sharing is outlawed by a 2016 state law that privacy and civil liberties advocates sought to regulate the fast-growing license-capturing industry, Bonta said at a press conference.

"Unfortunately, despite clear guidance from my office and multiple warnings, the city of El Cajon and its police department have refused to comply with this law," Bonta told reporters. "We are asking the court to declare El Cajon's practices unlawful, and to order the city and its police department to stop sharing this data unlawfully,"

An El Cajon spokesperson did not immediately return a request seeking comment. A spokesperson for Flock Safety declined to comment.

El Cajon Police Chief Jeremiah Larson has been a fan of the Flock Safety system, calling it an "absolute game-changer" that allows law enforcement to share information and track suspects as they move across jurisdictions. Larson told public media outlet KPBS this year that he reads the state's license-plate scanning law differently than Bonta and believes sharing images with state and local law enforcement agencies remains legal.

The use of automated license plate readers is commonplace among the nation's largest police and sheriffs' departments. According to a 2020 survey by the Bureau of Justice Statistics, almost 90% of sheriffs' offices with 500 or more sworn deputies reported using the technology. That number jumped to 100% for police departments serving cities with more than 1 million residents.

Privacy advocates have raised concerns about potential misuse of the broad-scale location information collected by the automated cameras and stored in huge databases by private companies. A potential multibillion-dollar class action challenging a company's authority to collect and sell such data related to California vehicles is now pending before the Fourth District Court of Appeal.

Those concerns have increased with the Trump administration's crackdown on undocumented immigration and some states' laws aimed at women seeking abortions. Federal immigration officials said during the previous Trump presidency that they used automated license-plate readers "in support of its criminal and administrative law enforcement missions."

Some California law enforcement agencies, under scrutiny for sharing and using information in these databases, have changed their practices.

The city of San Diego, for instance, restricted its license-plate-reader policies this year to stop providing information to federal agencies, including U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The Marin County sheriff agreed, too, to stop providing access to images from its jurisdiction to federal and out-of-state officers.

Bonta said that while his office had no evidence that El Cajon was directly providing information to federal authorities, it would be "naive" to think some of the states that do have access aren't sharing the data.
​
"Once it's shared with any entity out of the state of California, you lose control," Bonta said. "Some of these states are deep red states that are sharing information as much as they can with the federal government about the culture wars—whatever they may be —immigration enforcement, reproductive freedom, gender affirming care."