Wrong-way idea

The Alameda City Council is expected to vote Tuesday on whether to spend $500,000 on 13 license-plate recognition systems at the entrances and exits to the island city, creating records of every vehicle that passes through. It should vote no. The presumed rationale behind this proposal, which came from Alameda Police Chief Paul Rolleri, is the wave in auto break-ins and thefts that has plagued every city in the Bay Area.

Alameda is not special in its current suffering.

It should not use this moment to implement a policy that crosses a clear boundary on the matter of privacy. It’s also hard to divorce this latest move from Alameda’s unsettling history with its neighbor across the estuary.

Local fights over the smallest land-use developments, such as allowing the long-dormant Alameda Theater to transform into the multiplex movie theater it is now, have inevitably, descended into racially coded, fearmongering arguments about invasions of Oaklanders.

The premise that any crime in the tranquil suburb must be coming across the bridges or through the tunnels plays into the stereotypes that too often have infected local politics.

Proponents of the plan have noted that other local jurisdictions, including Tiburon, Belvedere and Piedmont, have licenseplate recognition systems surveilling all who enter and exit their borders. But these small, affluent cities shouldn’t be models for the rest of the Bay Area.

For one thing, their systems aren’t foolproof — they tend to yield false positives, and technology experts have criticized them as being open to abuse. For another thing, these systems are violations of privacy that have drawn ire and investigations from privacy watchdogs like the American Civil Liberties Union.

These towns’ actions are also, quite frankly, an insult to their neighbors. They eat away at the regional trust that’s going to be increasingly required for the Bay Area to solve its regional problems such as housing, transportation — and, yes, property crime.

Vote no, Alameda.