A pledge for Contra Costa County city councils
You should be able to drive to work without leaving a permanent record of it.
We're asking every council member and council candidate in the county to commit, in writing, to keeping mass surveillance out of our cities. Their answers go on this site.
Illustrative sample. Plate and camera IDs are invented.
The pledge
I will not vote to approve, renew, expand, or otherwise allow any mass surveillance system in my city — including but not limited to: license plate readers, facial recognition, drone surveillance, predictive policing, and networked camera systems. And, I will work to end any mass surveillance systems already in place.
For purposes of this pledge, mass surveillance system means any technology that collects and/or aggregates information about residents who are not suspected of a crime. It includes free trials, pilot programs, donated equipment, systems paid for by grants or private foundations, and access to networks run by other agencies. The definition applies regardless of vendor.
Why no exceptions
Every one of these systems arrived with rules attached.
The department would hold the data for 30 days. Only trained officers could search it. Nothing would leave the agency without a court order.
Those rules were mostly written in good faith, and they mostly didn't hold. Retention windows got extended at renewal, usually as a line item nobody flagged. Departments joined regional and national lookup networks, which meant agencies in other states could search local data without anyone here approving it. Where audits actually got run, they turned up officers looking up people they knew personally.
None of that took a villain. It took a couple of years and ordinary turnover.
That's really the whole argument. A use policy is a promise made by a council that won't be seated in five years, about a system that will be. Once the cameras go up, the only question still open is who gets to search them — and that question reopens with every new chief, every new council, and every change of administration in Washington.
So we aren't asking for better rules. We're asking our council members not to install the thing the rules would have to govern.
What we hear
The usual objections.
It helps us solve crimes.
Sometimes it does. We aren't opposed to police investigating crimes, and we aren't opposed to surveillance that follows a specific suspect with a warrant behind it. We're opposed to recording everyone who drives down San Pablo Ave and sorting out who was worth recording later, if ever.
If you've got nothing to hide, what's the problem?
The people who get hurt by plate data aren't the ones with something to hide in the way that phrase implies. They're women whose exes work in law enforcement, people going to a clinic, people going to a mosque, people at a protest, and anyone whose immigration status turns a routine stop into a much larger problem.
We'll write a strong use policy.
Every city that has one wrote it believing that. If you can point us to a department that has held to its original retention and sharing rules for ten years without an audit forcing the issue, we would like to see it.
It's free.
The pilot is. Renewal is where the money is, and by then the department has built its work around the system, so removing it reads as a cut to public safety. That's not a conspiracy, it's how the product is sold — and it's why a trial isn't a smaller decision than a contract.
Our police chief is asking for it.
The chief may well be right that it would make the job easier. But the chief isn't the one who has to answer to residents for what the data gets used for in 2031. The council is.
Next
Ask your council member. Then tell us what they said.
We publish every answer we get, in full and unedited, alongside the date we asked. If someone doesn't respond, we publish that too.