San Diego Union-Tribune
Source: Wayback availability API
PUBLISHED: September 30, 2026 at 6:54 PM PDT | UPDATED: September 30, 2026 at 7:07 PM
Teri Figueroa teri.figueroa@sduniontribune.com
A new lawsuit from a local civil rights advocacy group seeks to end the San Diego Police Department’s use of automated license plate readers, alleging the cameras and the database they create amount to an invasion of privacy rights under the state constitution.
Partnership for the Advancement of New Americans, which advocates for refugees and displaced people, also wants the city to stop using public money on a program it says violates constitutional rights. The suit was filed Tuesday in San Diego Superior Court.
The California Constitution “provides strong and affirmative privacy protections,” said Frederick Carroll, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union Foundation of San Diego & Imperial Counties, which is representing PANA.
“If privacy as guaranteed in the California Constitution is to mean anything at all, it means that Californians should not be subject to mass surveillance, mass data accumulation of their travels, a mosaic compilation of their everyday activities,” Carroll said.
San Diego police and the City Attorney’s Office declined to comment on the litigation.
The city of San Diego has 500 automated license plate readers, or ALPRs, posted around the city. The cameras record and store information on all vehicles in their view, creating a searchable database. The police department, which runs the local program, holds onto the data for 30 days unless it is used in an investigation.
The readers have become increasingly controversial, locally and nationwide, particularly as the Trump administration has ramped up immigration enforcement and surveillance of people protesting it.
Police hail the technology as a crime-fighting tool and point to crimes it has helped solve, including homicides. Critics argue it creates a mass surveillance network and tramples civil rights, including in marginalized communities. The cameras, they argue, can reveal a person’s travel patterns — where they work, go to school, shop, worship and more.
“This is the kind of technology that is dangerous in any hands,” Carroll told reporters Wednesday at a news conference in downtown San Diego.
The new lawsuit alleges that some local license-plate readers are in sensitive locations — including four cameras near a Muslim civil rights organization and another four by a reproductive health clinic.
With the readers, the plaintiffs say, San Diego police can “instantly reconstruct a person’s movements” in the city over the last month. And in car-centric San Diego, their lawsuit argues, there is no way for many people to avoid being caught in the department’s ALPR “surveillance web.”
In a news release announcing the suit, Homayra Yusufi, senior policy strategist at PANA, said that in the face of crackdowns on immigration and protests, “flawed surveillance technologies like ALPRs put us all at risk.”
“We are all at risk of becoming the next disfavored group,” she said at the news conference outside the Hall of Justice along Broadway.
She also pointed to the deadly attack on a San Diego mosque in May, when two teenagers who espoused hate rhetoric shot and killed three men at the Islamic Center of San Diego.
That morning, San Diego police, who had recently been made aware the pair could pose a threat, used ALPRs to look for the car they were in. The database got a hit — the car was headed east in Mission Valley.
Minutes later, however, the armed pair showed up at the Clairemont mosque, roughly five miles north.
“On that horrific day, ALPRs were not just an affront to our democracy, but they were ineffective,” Yusufi said.
Recent months have brought increased pushback nationwide against ALPR cameras — and specifically against Flock Safety, one of the biggest players in the market and the company with which San Diego contracts.
But the fight over surveillance tech is not new to San Diego. There has been so much concern that in 2022, the city created the Privacy Advisory Board to review through a civil rights lens the technology the city deploys.
Last year, as San Diego struggled to close a budget gap, privacy advocates lobbied to turn off the city’s ALPR network, which costs it $2 million a year to run.
In December, after review, the City Council voted 5-3 to keep the cameras in place.
State law prohibits law enforcement from sharing the data with entities outside of California. San Diego’s rules are stricter: Its ALPR network is on a figurative island, and no outside agencies are allowed to directly access it.
Any California law enforcement agency that does want San Diego police to share information must show it is investigating one of a limited number of types of crimes.
A few months ago, a San Diego-based appeals court refused to revive a class-action suit targeting private businesses who use Flock and other ALPR cameras, finding that the collection of license-plate data by a company does not, in and of itself, constitute harm.
That suit was brought under a state statute that specifically governs the use of ALPRs, whereas the new suit is focused on privacy rights under the California Constitution.