Sheriff abusing license plate information, lawsuit alleges
Three Marin County residents have sued Sheriff Robert Doyle, alleging his office is violating state law by sharing license plate data with federal and outof-state agencies.
Cesar Lagleva, Lisa Bennett and Tara Evans filed the lawsuit in Marin County Superior Court with the help of the American Civil Liberties Union and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a San Francisco digital rights organization.
“When counties and municipalities like Marin County share and transfer this information to federal immigration agencies, it is used to track, detain and deport immigrants,” says the lawsuit, which seeks to stop the practice.
The Sheriff’s Office shares information from license plate scanners — known in the law enforcement field as automated license plate readers, or ALPRs — with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Customs and Border Protection, 18 other federal agencies and 424 out-of-state law enforcement agencies, according to the filling.
“Those agencies use this kind of sensitive information to track, target and deport immigrants,” said Vasudha Talla, immigrant rights program director at the ACLU of Northern California.
In a statement posted on the organization’s website, Bennett, co-chair of the group ICE Out of Marin, wrote, “When I found out through the ACLU’s work that the sheriff has been illegally sharing peoples’ license plate and location information with federal immigration enforcement, I wanted to get involved.”
Bennett and Lagleva declined to be interviewed. Lagleva referred instead to his statement on the ACLU website.
“The safety of immigrants in Marin County is a very dear, true and personal matter for me, and it has galvanized my involvement in local immigration advocacy,” he wrote.
The Sheriff’s Office issued a statement in response to the complaint: “The Marin County Sheriff’s Office is aware of a lawsuit about our License Plate Reader program that has been made public but has not yet been served against us.”
“Following recommendations from the California state auditor in 2020, we have made significant changes to our policies and practices on the LPR program,” the statement said. “The LPR program does not identify anybody’s ethnicity or immigration status. We will defend our LPR policy in court.”
The license plate cameras capture color images of plates and vehicles either from other moving vehicles, such as patrol cars, or fixed locations, such as light poles or overpasses. The images are stored in a searchable database along with the date, time and Global Positioning System coordinates.
According to the suit, the sheriff’s office has 12 cameras, eight assigned to its patrol division and four to its auto theft division. Law enforcement officers typically use the information to find stolen cars or people wanted for crimes or to seek out witnesses and missing persons.
Last year, California Auditor Elaine Howle issued a report that criticized the Marin County Sheriff’s Office and three other California police departments for failing to fully implement requirements contained in Senate Bill 34 for protecting privacy when using ALPR systems.
Howle wrote that SB 34, which became effective in 2016, mandates detailed usage and privacy policies. She said the policies are supposed to describe the ALPR system’s purpose, who may use it, how the agency will share data, how the agency will protect and monitor the system, and how long the agency will keep the data.
“Yet the agencies we reviewed have not implemented all of the requirements in that law,” Howle wrote.
The Marin lawsuit says SB 34 “prohibits the sharing and transferring of ALPR information with any agencies other than in-state agencies.”
The complaint alleges that the sheriff’s practice of sharing data also violated the California Values Act, which limits the use of state and local resources to assist federal immigration enforcement.
A third-party vendor, Vigilant Solutions, manages the sheriff’s ALPR data using cloud storage. The lawsuit says many law enforcement agencies across the country use the same database and can access Marin County’s information once designated as a “sharing partner” by the Sheriff’s Office.
The suit states that “in a several-month period in 2018, ICE performed over 30,000 searches per month of the ALPR information shared via the database.”
The ACLU has conceded, however, that it doesn’t know whether these queries represent individual, unique searches or whether some are multiple attempts to find information about the same license plate.
The sheriff’s policy manual, which is posted online, says: “The ALPR data may be shared only with other law enforcement or prosecutorial agencies for official law enforcement purposes or as otherwise permitted by law.”
The policy says agencies seeking access to Marin County data must make a request through Vigilant stating their name and the name of the person making the request.
“The agency shall be verified as a law enforcement or prosecutorial agency with a need to know the information,” the policy states. “The request will be reviewed by the auto theft sergeant or the authorized designee.”