Opinion: Why is San Diego Paying for More Police Surveillance?

Gates is a professor of communication at UC San Diego and author of “Targeted: Corporations and the Police Surveillance Economy,” published by NYU Press.

Surveillance has become an extremely profitable business and companies like Flock Safety know it. Flock is realizing its model for financial growth by building a nation-wide license plate reader system that police can use to track anyone and everyone, everywhere they go.

Flock reported over $300 million in recurring revenue in 2024 and raised nearly a billion dollars from private investors. Where will the recurring revenue come from for realizing this company’s plans for exponential growth? We know one place they plan to get it: from the budgets of cities like San Diego.

The San Diego City Council is struggling with its budget and has had to make significant cuts to programs across the city. It is raising taxes and creating new fees to get more revenue in. This expenditure for Automated License Plate Readers, or ALPR, technology which has not proven to reduce crime, will set the city back $2 to $3 million annually. This is simply a wealth transfer from the citizens of San Diego to a private company.

Flock’s technology is being used by ICE to track and forcibly remove immigrants, as CalMatters reported. We also know that Flock’s sharing-forward design and lack of basic security practices like two-factor authentication make data sharing easy to do and hard to track.

No one opposes using tools to investigate crimes within the boundaries of the U.S. Constitution. The Fourth Amendment defines legal surveillance quite clearly: it requires a warrant, and that warrant must particularly describe the place to be searched and the persons or things to be seized. The Supreme Court’s decision in Carpenter v. United States established that cell tower locations reveal an intimate picture of life and thus require a warrant – does a dense ALPR network not create the same issue? The constitution does not make exceptions for companies like Flock Safety or for the San Diego Police Department.

The ever-growing surveillance capacities that companies are building in partnership with police and other government agencies are being used in ways that make our vital constitutional safeguards meaningless. 

If surveillance has become big business, it is also used as a political weapon. Activists of all stripes have been targeted by police surveillance: labor organizers, civil rights leaders, anti-war protestors, organizers fighting companies that pollute the environment, people trying to curb over-policing in their communities, and more. On top of this, the U.S. legal system has a systemic problem with meting out wrongful convictions, as police investigators choose their suspects and go after them relentlessly, even fabricating and suppressing evidence to gain their convictions. False confessions from innocent people are a rampant problem, endemic to our prosecutorial system.

Police misuse of their power is widespread and well documented. But the real problem is much greater than misuse. The real threat is the regular use of license plate reader technology to track and apprehend anyone and everyone, for any reason, across an entire nationwide surveillance network. This is what Flock is building, what it must build to achieve its financial growth imperatives to its investors.

It is not just immigrants who end up on the wrong side of an authoritarian political system. President Donald Trump has already openly stated his intention to unleash federal task forces on college students who dare speak against his policies. The way authoritarian governments stay in power is by exercising power both strategically and arbitrarily, using the powers of the police – here, ICE, the FBI, DEA and so many other agencies, alongside SDPD. Let’s remove the infrastructure that makes it possible.

More surveillance will not help San Diego. Affordable housing is far more important to the health of this city. Drug treatment programs are far more important to the health of the city. Libraries and cultural institutions are more important to the health of this city. The list goes on of places to direct tax revenues that would serve our city rather than the growth strategies of tech companies that are capitalizing on the public’s fear of crime.

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