Long Beach Police Want to Buy $1.2 Million Worth of Additional Spy Gear

The Long Beach Police Department plans to seek City Council approval today to spend $1.2 million in federal grant money to purchase additional mass surveillance equipment.

Police are hoping to upgrade their network of automatic license plate readers (ALPR), street-level surveillance cameras attached to police vehicles or street poles that automatically capture license plate numbers, along with the location, date, and time the photograph was taken. This data can be stored in a database for up to two years. A spokesperson for the LBPD said the department plans to purchase 34 vehicle-mounted ALPR camera systems for patrol cars, 4 trailers with ALPR camera systems and 4 trailer lifting kits.

These cameras give police the power to collect an alarming amount of information on the movements of Long Beach residents. In 2019 alone, the Beachcomber reported that the LBPD scanned over 24.7 million plates—that’s about 68,000 scans a day. The data can then be used to reconstruct residents’ historical travel patterns with chilling precision and can even allow police to predict future movements. Where you work, what doctor you visit, where you shop, who you hang out with—all intimate information that is collected by these cameras, pooled into massive data banks held by a private company, and shared with law enforcement agencies across the state.

The LBPD’s request to purchase more mass surveillance equipment disregards the recommendations put forward by the city’s Equity and Humans Relations Commission (EHRC) in September to ban the use of ALPRs, delete any stored data collected by the devices, and redirect the $7.3 million the city was spending on surveillance technology as of last year toward social programs that have proven to increase community safety.

The Long Beach Anti-Surveillance Coalition, made up of various community groups, is urging residents to join them at the City Council chambers at 5 p.m. to oppose the purchase and further use of this technology.

“The Anti-Surveillance Coalition demands that this technology is banned, not reformed or used under supervision but banned,” said Jamilet Ochoa, a community organizer with the Long Beach Immigrant Rights Coalition. “We believe there isn’t a softer or kinder way to spy on, intimidate, and criminalize people. As a community, we do not feel safe knowing that we are being watched on our way to work or picking up our children from school. These are real lives and families we are talking about.”

Police say the ALPR technology will be used to “recover stolen vehicles and identify wanted vehicles involving murder, kidnapping, robbery, and other types of investigations.”

But of the millions of scans conducted in Long Beach in 2019, only a fraction of a percent are hits on cars associated with a reported crime, according to police records obtained by attorney Greg Buhl who runs local police transparency website CheckLBPD.org. That means that virtually all (99.93%) of the license plate data collected that year was on law-abiding drivers.

A study published last year by The Independent Institute, a nonprofit that describes itself as a nonpartisan public policy research organization, evaluated 16 years of ALPR data used by the police department in Piedmont, CA–a “super user” of license plate scanning technology–and found that while there was no evidence showing that ALPRs are effective at giving law enforcement investigative leads, they did pose a serious threat to residents’ civil liberties.

In 2020, the LBPD’s data mining of license plate records led to two innocent women who had attended a Black Lives Matter protest getting roped into criminal investigations, with one woman even held at gunpoint after getting stopped by police.

For years, Long Beach police have used ALPR cameras and software developed by Motorola subsidiary Vigilant Solutions. Now police are seeking approval to purchase license plate readers from distributor Mallory Safety and Supply, LLC through an existing contract established by Fairfax County in Virginia. This arrangement would sidestep the lengthy public bidding process and cut costs, according to the city.

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“LBPD is trying to fast-track the procurement of costly and expansive surveillance technology, but you can’t take shortcuts to building trust. We are under-funding life-affirming resources for our most impacted communities, and over-funding blunt tools of enforcement and surveillance,” said Joshua De Leon, a community organizer with the Anti-Surveillance Coalition.

The LBPD said purchasing new ALPR equipment is part of their preparation to ensure public safety during the upcoming 2028 Olympics. The Games have long been used to justify police militarization and the expansion of the surveillance state—in fact the last time LA hosted the Olympics in 1984, the police buildup helped fuel the War on Drugs. NOlympics LA Coalition warned LA County residents in 2021 that another law enforcement mobilization like that will be to the detriment of Black and brown communities.  

LBPD’s move to upgrade their surveillance network is especially disturbing considering their dismal track record of violating state law and endangering undocumented residents with their use of this technology and indiscriminate data sharing. FORTHE first reported in 2020 that the LBPD was unlawfully sharing ALPR data—including license plate numbers and location information—with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and dozens of other law enforcement agencies nationwide.

In light of this information, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) sent a letter to city officials strongly urging them to stop their data sharing practices to comply with state law, and take action to outright ban the use of ALPRs to protect the civil rights of Long Beach residents.

Though this action by the ACLU did force the police to end their data sharing with ICE and out-of-state law enforcement agencies (a practice LBPD claimed was erroneous), concerns around LBPD’s move to acquire more ALPR equipment persist.

In the LBPD’s latest memo to the City Council, police officials promise to use this mass surveillance technology lawfully and prevent sharing the data it collects with federal immigration authorities such as ICE. Police also say they are working to finalize an update to their ALPR policy.

However, community organizers say nothing short of a blanket ban on the use of this powerful technology is acceptable.

“It appears the policy is still in draft form, and what appears of it in the memo is unclear,” said Caitlin Bellis, an immigration attorney with the Anti-Surveillance Coalition. “Only a ban on this technology would protect undocumented people, especially because neither LBPD nor Vigilant Solutions can be trusted to follow their own policies.”

**This article has been updated to include a summarized list of planned purchases by the LBPD.

Kevin Flores contributed to this report.