(The Bulletin) – The Compton City Council voted unanimously to okay the usage of Automatic License Plate Readers (ALPR) and PTZ cameras throughout the city to assist law enforcement, in this case, the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department and other agencies that work within the city, with vehicle-related crimes.
“As you know, this is an initiative that we embarked upon some time ago, with the primary focus on overall public safety,” Compton City Manager Willie A. Hopkins Jr. said. “And as we’ve embarked upon this, we’ve continued to look into some other areas that this capabilities will allow us to address.”
The vote came during the April 7 council meeting. During the public hearing section of the council meeting, a handful of residents voiced their concerns over the ALPR and cameras as another way to dive into the privacy of citizens and handing over another tool for law enforcement to track down and possibly disrupt the lives of immigrants.
After some discussion, the council voted 5-0 for the city to use 74 ALPR and 24 cameras from Flock Safety, Inc. The deal reached between Flock Safety, Inc. and the City of Compton will encompass a 120-day trial period of the product.
Basically, the city will be allowed to use the license plate readers and cameras for four months for free to see how beneficial they can be.
“Flock has been proven to be an extremely valuable tool in law enforcement throughout this country, ” Hopkins remarked. “There are people that have issues with what they deem as privacy, but the Supreme Court has already deemed when you’re in public, you have no privacy.”
The proposed agreement will cost the city $801,642 for usage of the products over a two-year span after the trial period concludes. The license plate readers and cameras are being used to enhance public safety in the city.
A couple of ways the ALPR and cameras can do that is tracking down stolen vehicles and keeping tabs on local crime suspects.
Hopkins fielded questions from council members about the ALPR and cameras from transparency to data access to resident concerns. He also informed the council how the tools can be of great use to the city.
“We, as a city, have a couple of things within this agreement,” Hopkins stated. “One, the city controls who has access to the data, and right now, our game plan is our data will only be stored for approximately 30 days, unless we pull it because it’s needed for some investigation. In conjunction with that, in this agreement, we are being provided with a four-month trial that allows us to test this system and see the benefits of it.”
Photo by Will Freeman/Pexels
