Larry Wilson: Deflock the cities of the San Gabriel Valley and Whittier

Coppers, always with the pictures.

Law enforcement just loves taking photographs of us. Dash cams, license-plate cams, red-light cams, cameras on drones flying in formation up there above the traffic supposedly to make it easier to reconstruct who's at fault in the fender-benders.

Getting on a plane at Burbank? Smile.

You know the only time police are camera-shy? When the lenses are focused on themselves. Then it's like against the law, or something. (Of course it's not. But the law is what John Law says it is, sometimes.)

You can try to resist the rising tide of photography of everything, or you can just suck it up.

I love it when a group of people opt for resist.

That's what Deflock Pasadena is doing. "We are fighting back against Flock Safety cameras," the organization writes in its mission statement, "an AI-driven technology that has been shown to be used by ICE to fuel its deportation machine."

The group is part of an umbrella organization called Pasadena Privacy, which maps, publishes the locations of and opposes the use of Flock Safety Automated License Plate Readers by the Pasadena Police Department. It's also for protecting data privacy in general and lobbies for the city to cancel all its surveillance contracts.

You can go maps.deflock.org, and see the location of license-plate cameras around the whole country, and then you can narrow it to your neighborhood. Which I just did. And, mercy. There at the signaled intersection just down the block from my house, the only traffic light within a mile of here, are cameras aimed in three directions, with fields of vision for maybe 20 or 30 yards. The only direction they're not permanently monitoring is east. Toward me. Thanks, coppers! Not that I want to give you any big ideas.

As Bill Kelly and Nicholas Rabb write in an op-ed at the Colorado Boulevard news site, "Pasadena officials are preparing to debate whether the city should continue operating one of the region's largest automated license plate reader networks. … This comes as dozens of cities across the nation, including Santa Cruz and South Pasadena, are cancelling their Flock contracts in response to growing concerns about the misuse of Flock data."

Need to be prompted on the reasons why we need to nip this shutterbug thing in the bud?: "ICE has accessed Flock databases in California despite sanctuary state prohibitions. Police have used the Flock network to personally stalk people, to track down women traveling from states where abortions are banned, to surveil No Kings protesters, and to surveil children in public spaces."

So, there you go.

The ACLU of Massachusetts, the authors write, "found that Flock's default user agreement with police ‘gives the company the right to share data with federal and local agencies for "investigative purposes,"‘ even if a local department chooses to restrict data to its own officers."

Again, all the pictures are all good with law enforcement so long as it's not in the frame. I really like what new Whittier Mayor Jamie Becerra did earlier this month when there was some kind of immigration raid happening in his own city and he tried to inquire about what was going on. As staffer Anissa Rivera reports, in a video taken by a civilian, Becerra is "seen walking to and introducing himself to a man in the driver's seat of a black Nissan Pathfinder. After confirming his identity, Becerra asks if the officer is conducting an ICE raid, to which the man says he is there for ‘surveillance enforcement.' The agent then gestures toward the camera and says he won't talk if he is being recorded. ‘You are a sworn officer and you're refusing to talk to the mayor,' Becerra says. ‘I can talk to you but not if it's being recorded,' the agent says."

Every city in the San Gabriel Valley and Whittier areas should begin to take us out of the picture.

Write the public editor at lwilson@scng,com

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