Police Crack Down On Street Takeovers With High-Tech Surveillance As 4th Amendment Battles Loom

Authored by Beige Luciano-Adams via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

LOS ANGELES—As police across California crack down on illegal street racing, takeovers, and sideshows, technology companies are marketing new surveillance tools to meet the demand—prompting questions about the implications for privacy rights and Fourth Amendment protections.

In the Bay Area and Los Angeles, where incidents have become increasingly brazen and violent in recent years, often drawing hundreds of attendees and overwhelming police, agencies already rely on planes, drones, and automatic license plate reader (ALPR) cameras as they aim to reduce the risk to first responders.

And they’ve begun to see results.

On Oct. 25 in the Bay Area, the California Highway Patrol (CHP) reported the seizure of 16 vehicles that had been involved in two separate takeovers a month prior. Officers couldn’t reach the center of the sideshow before it moved to another location, but they collected video evidence from cameras placed around the Bay Bridge. That led investigators to a list of vehicles, allowing them to request seizures orders from a judge.

Armed with these technologies, CHP officers sent to Oakland to crack down on illegal sideshows and rising violent and retail crime have seized more than 2,000 stolen vehicles since February.

And a controversial surveillance system used by police to detect gunshots and fireworks is now being remarketed as a tool to listen for the sounds of illegal street racing, takeovers and sideshows—like screeching tires—according to an Oct. 23 announcement from Flock Safety, an Atlanta-based company that leases surveillance systems to thousands of law enforcement agencies across the United States.

Audio detection offers an additional angle that can be integrated with existing camera networks and analytics, which Flock said in its announcement will provide a “deeper layer of insight, enabling [police] to track repeat offenders and analyze patterns linked to sideshows.”

When the cameras mounted at intersections are used in conjunction with audio detectors, the analytics system generates a report that lists vehicles, ranked by frequency, near confirmed shootings, fireworks, sideshows or takeovers, according to the company.

The selling point is that the AI-powered system identifies patterns nearly instantly that would typically take hours or days for humans.

The newly reconfigured technology raises old questions about the balance between privacy and public safety, which civil rights groups have already been litigating—in the courts and in the public sphere—for years.

For critics, the deployment of such technologies is part of a long march, a stealth encroachment on constitutional rights that has accelerated in the years since 9/11.

“Some of these are mass surveillance technologies that shouldn’t be permitted to operate in a democratic society,” Jay Stanley, a senior policy analyst with the American Civil Liberties Union, told The Epoch Times. “We don’t watch everybody all the time, just in case somebody does something wrong somewhere.”

Technologies like Flock’s cameras and audio detection devices, mounted at public intersections throughout the country in an increasingly dense network, raise questions about the “boundary between what can be done in today’s technology and what should be done,” Stanley said.

According to a February 2020 report by the state auditor, nearly all of California’s law enforcement agencies already use surveillance cameras that automatically read and report license plate data along with other details of the vehicle, time, and location.

These typically use infrared cameras to read license numbers and feed them into databases, but some cameras, like Flock’s, can capture more than license plates—things like car color and make, as well as small identifying details.

According to Flock’s website, police departments in New York, California, Illinois, Texas, and Louisiana are among those already using the company’s Raven system for gunshot detection, which the company claims is 90 percent accurate in identifying gunshots.

Accuracy Claims

Various reports have called such claims into question—including a May annual review by the City of San Jose, which initially found around half of alerts were confirmed to be gunshots, with around a third being false positives. After some adjustments to the system, the confirmed number went up to nearly 80 percent.

Critics argue the tendency of acoustic gunshot detection toward false positives can put people at risk, for example by sending police to a location expecting gunfire where there are innocent people. Such technologies can also record human voices, which law enforcement agencies have used in court.

“As is so often the case with police surveillance technologies, a device initially deployed for one purpose (here, to detect gunshots) has been expanded to another purpose (to spy on conversations with sensitive microphones),” said the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit focused on the intersection of civil rights and digital technology.

Some cities have canceled contracts with Flock or similar providers after analysis revealed disappointing results.

A 2021 investigation of Flock competitor ShotSpotter found the acoustic gunshot detection system generated more than 40,000 dead-end deployments in Chicago in less than two years, with the vast majority of alerts turning up no evidence of gunfire or related crime.

The Champaign Police Department in Illinois last year opted not to renew its contract with Flock after results fell short of marketing claims. Data obtained by local journalists showed 59 out of 64 alerts were “unfounded,” with 21 of those likely caused by fireworks.

“To date, the system has not yet lived up to performance expectations, including misidentifying some sounds—such as fireworks or a vehicle backfire—as possible gunfire,” a police official told CU Citizen Access.

Flock did not offer an estimate of accuracy in its announcement of the Raven systems repurposed to listen for vehicular chaos, nor did it respond to an inquiry about how many communities use Raven to detect the sounds of street takeovers. But other media have reported at least two Bay Area law enforcement agencies are already using it.

A Growing Network

Cameras that read license plates and microphones that listen for gunshots have