Public Comment

There was a report on evening news, and an article in today’s Chronicle (1/27/2018, C2) about how ICE can use the data collected by license-plate readers to track down immigrants they want to arrest. When Berkeley bought into the license-plate reader technology, it did so with the assurance that the data collected by those readers would not be available to the federal government. But according to these reports, it is the vendor of the technology that also absorbs the data of these readers into their own database. And they will sell it to the government, or to specific agencies.

I do not know the name of the technology vendor that Berkeley purchased its l-p readers from, but the company mentioned in these reports was Vigilant Solutions.

If the BPD is sharing its data collections with the technology vendor, then its promises not to share its data with the federal government is seriously compromised, to the point of being in violation of all the principles of sanctuary that we support. This needs to be investigated, and steps taken.