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Gov. Gavin Newsom vetoed a bill that would have tightened rules on how police in California use automated license plate readers, saying the regulations would impede criminal investigations.

The Legislature approved the proposal last month amid reports police were misusing the data, including a CalMatters story in June showing that officers on more than 100 occasions violated a state law against sharing the data with federal authorities and others outside the state.

The veto comes as new CalMatters reporting shows Riverside County Sheriff’s deputies appear to have violated internal policy by not documenting the specific incident details related to the plate’s tracking.

In his veto message this week, Newsom cited examples of how the proposed restrictions, which would have required police to better document their searches and delete some of their data within two months, could stymie police work.

“For example,” he wrote, “it may not be apparent, particularly with respect to cold cases, that license plate data is needed to solve a crime until after the 60-day retention period has elapsed.”

But evidence is growing that the technology is being misused. Records newly reviewed by CalMatters indicate that Riverside County Sheriff’s deputies are misusing “hotlists” that allow them to automatically monitor for certain cars.

The measure vetoed by the governor, Senate Bill 274, would have limited the kinds of license plate monitoring lists agencies can use to those related to missing persons or license plate lists maintained by the National Crime Information Center or California Department of Justice. It also would have required data security and privacy training for officers who use the tech and force them to document which specific case or task force work a search is related to.

The bill also would have required agencies to delete some collected data within 60 days and instructed the state Department of Justice to perform random audits of how license plate technology is used.

The proposal drew opposition from nearly 30 law enforcement agencies and associations, including the Riverside County Sheriff’s Office and the California Police Chiefs Association. The Riverside County Sheriff’s Office opposed the bill because a requirement to delete data after two months could ”mean the difference between solving a murder and letting a killer walk free,” according to a letter written by sheriff Chad Bianco, a Republican candidate for governor.

Automated license plate readers can assist criminal investigations or help find stolen cars or missing people, but they can also make errors that lead to false arrests, or enable misuse for personal reasons.

A database of license plate lists from July to August reviewed by CalMatters shows that the Riverside County Sheriff’s Department, which has a network of more than 500 cameras, maintained hundreds of custom license plate lists from July to August, adding more than 700 plates to the lists in that time. Close to 100 of the plates tracked in lists were added using vague justifications, which makes it difficult to verify if deputies complied with laws and policies around use of the technology. Under department policy, tracking lists must include, among other things, “specific incident details.”

It’s not clear if deputies properly shared all hotlists with supervisors. Some have names that contain words like “personal” or “private.” A total of 32 of them have access permissions limiting alerts of a plate sighting to a single user. Riverside County Sheriff’s office automated license plate reader policy states that “no user shall create a custom hot list accessible only to themselves.”

A spokesperson for the Riverside County Sheriff’s Office wrote in an email that it is common practice for deputies to create personal hotlists tracking license plates and that all deputies are able to create such lists. Asked about vague justifications attached to some lists, they wrote, “These entries are related to criminal investigations.” The Riverside County Sheriff’s Office did not respond to questions about whether some deputy hotlists violated policy.

The database shows that deputies have several practices that would have been outlawed had Newsom signed the bill to further regulate license plate readers.

In the Riverside license plate hotlist data examined by CalMatters, over 90% of the license plate entries added to tracking in July and August left the case field blank, which would have been prohibited under the bill.

Last month, Briana Ortega filed a lawsuit against the Riverside County Sheriff’s Office, Sheriff Chad Bianco, and Deputy Eric Piscatella. Ortega alleges that after she met Piscatella at a festival in Coachella in September 2023, he stalked her in order to pursue a romantic relationship with her by illegally obtaining her phone number and address through a sheriff’s office database, then repeatedly running her license plate through Riverside County Sheriff’s Office and state database without legal cause. Piscatella pled guilty to seven counts of misusing sheriff’s department databases in July.

It’s unclear whether automated license plate readers played a role in deputy Piscatella’s misconduct.

When asked if Deputy Piscatella used ALPR to track Ortega’s whereabouts before the misconduct came to light, a department spokesperson told CalMatters “This information is part of an ongoing investigation.”

Police in other states have misused license plate readers. Earlier this year in Florida, a police officer was accused by police investigators of using automated license plate readers to stalk his girlfriend for seven months. Last year, a Kansas police chief resigned after a state commission said he used the tech to track an ex-girlfriend. Another Kansas police officer was arrested for allegedly using license plate readers to stalk his estranged wife.

Police and sheriff’s departments have a history of violating other laws by using license plate readers. A CalMatters investigation in June found that roughly a dozen law enforcement agencies throughout Southern California shared data with federal immigration agencies like Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Border Patrol, a violation of a California law that went into effect 10 years ago. That same log had tens of thousands of searches with no clear justification.

Records requests by groups including the American Civil Liberties Union and the Electronic Frontier Foundation in 2023 found that 71 law enforcement agencies violated the state law against sharing license plate reader data with out-of-state agencies and the federal government. In the wake of those findings, Attorney General Rob Bonta issued an advisory to police with specific guidance on how to comply with the law.

Since 2024, Bonta’s office has sent letters to 18 law enforcement agencies across California for possible violations of state law, from sheriff’s offices in Contra Costa and Sacramento County in Northern California to the Riverside County Sheriff’s Office and the El Cajon Police Department in San Diego County. California Attorney General Rob Bonta filed a lawsuit against the city of El Cajon today alleging that the El Cajon Police Department repeatedly shared license plate reader data with law enforcement agencies in 26 states.

“This technology is ungovernable, given the number of agencies, interests, and impossibility of true compliance enforcement,” said UC San Diego associate professor Lilly Irani in response to the veto.

Irani is part of the steering committee for TRUST SD Coalition, a group of more than 30 organizations that’s pressuring the city of San Diego to end use of automated license plate readers.

The popularity of license plate readers among law enforcement agencies isn’t keeping up with the necessary civil liberty and privacy protections, said Pedro Rios, director of the American Friends Service Committee’s U.S.-Mexico Border Program, a group that opposes how surveillance tech impacts migrant communities in places like El Cajon. He thinks the governor missed an opportunity to have random audits of police departments to ensure compliance with existing law and protect against abuse of power

“If there is any misuse, how can we be sure that that type of misuse or recent practices aren’t repeated if the agencies that are using them aren’t being held accountable?” he said.