Solano Supes vote to expand vehicle surveillance in South Vallejo

VALLEJO – The Solano County Board of Supervisors voted to dramatically increase the number of vehicle surveillance cameras in an unincorporated area of Vallejo at Tuesday’s meeting, which will make the neighborhood one of the most heavily surveilled areas in the city.  

The supervisors approved a two-year contract to lease 23 Flock Safety automated license plate reader cameras for the Homeacres neighborhood, which is in a cutout of land in South Vallejo under county jurisdiction.

The city of Vallejo currently operates 95 Flock cameras at various locations across the city. The newly approved contract will spread 23 cameras across a neighborhood that is only a half square-mile.

Homeacers is a narrow slice of land between the Glen Cove Safeway and Homeacres Avenue. The county’s jurisdiction includes this area as well as a narrow strip along the highway, the Interstate 780/80 interchange and another portion west of I-80 between Curtola Parkway and Benicia Road that ends at Beach Street.

Prior to proposing leasing the cameras for the Homeacres neighborhood, the county planning division distributed a survey to 550 owner occupied homes in the neighborhood. According to planning program manager Allan Calder, the results indicated strong community support for installation of the ALPR cameras.

But some privacy advocates raised concerns during Tuesday’s meeting. Tracy Rosenberg of Oakland Privacy, a regional civil rights and privacy advocacy group, said during the public comment period that state law requires the county to post an up-to-date ALPR policy on its website and that policy is required to be vetted at a public meeting and approved by the Board of Supervisors.  

Rosenberg said that the policy that is currently posted on the county website contains out of date information which allows sharing ALPR data with U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, which is prohibited by state law.

“I don’t think that you want to be the only agency in the area that is still sharing ALPR scans with ICE,” Rosenberg said.

Rosenberg said that, in order to comply with state law, the county should present an updated policy at a public meeting before approving the lease for the equipment.

After Rosenberg’s comments, a county staff member recommended the board approve leasing the cameras because the policy could be reviewed during the time it takes to order and install the equipment.

The staff report for the funding proposal states that in order to address concerns from the American Civil Liberties Union, the data collected from the cameras will not be used for immigration enforcement, purposes related to gender affirming care or reproductive care, traffic enforcement or harassment or intimidation of a protected class.

Oakland Privacy sued the city of Vallejo in 2020 over its purchase of a cell site simulator, which allows police to intercept cell phone communications. The lawsuit eventually led to the creation of Vallejo’s Surveillance Advisory Board, but the new surveillance will not be subject to oversight by the board.

Vallejo’s Surveillance Advisory Board chair Andrea Sorce said in an email, “It concerns me that residents of unincorporated areas in Vallejo do not have an oversight body such as the Surveillance Advisory Board to provide that layer of transparency, and I hope that county supervisors will take that into account.”

The two-year lease and service agreement for the 23 cameras will cost $161,546, which will be drawn from funds originally set aside in 1983 when a redevelopment agency was created to build the Glen Cove neighborhood.

The redevelopment agency was formed through an agreement with the county which combined the blighted Homeacres neighborhood and the undeveloped Glen Cove area in order to qualify as a redevelopment project. The agreement arranged for $5 million from the redevelopment agency’s tax revenue to go toward the repair of degraded infrastructure and dilapidated housing in the Homeacres neighborhood.

According to a court ruling, the funds were misappropriated and the neighborhood only received $1.8 million. The Homeacres Improvement Association and Solano County sued the Vallejo Redevelopment Agency for the remaining funds. The county has used the funds to offer redevelopment loans to homeowners and to fund projects to abate blight in the neighborhood.

Donald Tipton, treasurer of the Homeacres Improvement Association, said that about two years ago, the representatives from the Solano County Sheriff’s Office contacted members of the Homeacres Association regarding the possibility of using the neighborhood’s blight abatement funding for security cameras.

Tipton said that some residents had already signed up to share video footage from their home security systems with law enforcement. Installing cameras that the sheriff’s office could monitor seemed like an appropriate next step.

According to Tipton, the Homeacres Improvement Association held meetings to discuss the possibility of installing the cameras, but he said that they were not as well attended as he would have liked. “When 20 people show up, I think that is a pretty good number but we were getting about ten participants at the meetings,” Tipton said.

He said those who attended were supportive of the project. “We were trying to get something accomplished here to make our area safer than what the city of Vallejo offers,” he said.

Editor's note: This story has been updated to clarify that the cameras would be leased, not purchased, from Flock.