The new armada of automated license plate readers in SF are taking three million surveillance photos every day, but the SF Police Department is being cagey about disclosing where the hundreds of cameras are located.
The automated license plate readers that SFPD installed around town last January are sitting in plain sight, they are not in any way hidden. Same goes for those mobile surveillance camera towers sitting outside the 16th and 24th Street BART stations, which are often getting tagged, or being used as a sitting space for illegal street vendors, as people may not realize that those things are police cameras. These new cameras and police drones were enabled by Mayor London Breed’s March 2024 ballot measure Prop E, which greatly expanded police surveillance powers.
Now a year into the automated license plate reader (ALRP) program, the Chronicle reports these cameras are taking about three million pictures a day of cars moving about San Francisco. But the Chron also notes that in the last eight months, these three million pictures a day have resulted in only 42,000 “hits,” that is, positive identifications of a vehicle SFPD was looking for. These have apparently resulted in 140 arrests…