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PREVIOUSLY

• The Humboldt County Sheriff’s Office Appears to be Violating Its Own Policy and State Law on Automated License Plate Readers

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This morning, shortly after the Outpost published its investigation into the Humboldt County Sheriff’s Office’s automated license plate reader (ALPR) program, Undersheriff Justin Braud came by our office and delivered printed-out responses to the questions we had submitted back on Sept. 26.

He also informed us that the Sheriff’s Office has an updated version of its ALPR policy that differs from the one we referenced in yesterday’s story. The current version of the policy, which starts at page 498 of the Policies and Procedures manual accessible through this link, includes many changes and lists information about Flock Safety, the Atlanta-based company that supplies the Sheriff’s Office’s ALPR equipment and stores and maintains the associated data in its “secure cloud.”

While the updated version of the policy is still not conspicuously posted on the Sheriff’s Office’s website, as required by California Civil Code, Braud informed us that the agency has established an online transparency portal, as Sheriff William Honsal vowed to do last year when the ALPR program was launched. 

That portal lists all 293 of the California law enforcement agencies that have been granted access to the Humboldt County Sheriff’s Office’s ALPR data, but it does not list information about the hundreds of thousands of monthly searches through which those agencies gain access to the data. Instead, it lists information about searches conducted by the Sheriff’s Office own staff. One hundred eighty-eight of them were conducted in the last 30 days, and the agency’s ALPR cameras detected 117,586 vehicles over that period, according to the website.

A recent CalMatters investigation found that roughly a dozen police and sheriff’s departments throughout Southern California shared such data with federal immigration agencies, a violation of Senate Bill 34. Similarly, Attorney General Rob Bonta is suing the City of El Cajon for illegally sharing license plate data with out-of-state law enforcement. We asked Braud what, if anything, the Sheriff’s Office is doing to prevent outside agencies from accessing its ALPR data for illegitimate purposes or from sharing it with federal agencies. 

He said that while the Sheriff’s Office does not inspect and approve each individual search request before granting access to its ALPR databases, it does conduct after-the-fact audits. He also said Flock Safety is working to cut down on misuse of its technology.

“I talked to the sheriff about it today,” Braud said. “Flock realizes this is a big deal, and they’re introducing new protocols that will intercept activity like that and not allow it to go through.”

As for the behavior of outside law enforcement agencies, Braud said, “All agencies are required to follow policy and law. We’re trusting that they’re adhering to that. They promise to do so when requesting permission, and if we find out they’re not, we would discontinue allowing them to access our system.”

The City of El Cajon, which is being sued by the Attorney General for repeatedly violating state law by sharing ALPR data with law enforcement agencies in more than two dozen states, is still listed on the Sheriff’s Office’s transparency portal as one of the external organizations with access to its data. So are the Los Angeles Police Department and sheriff’s departments in San Diego and Orange counties despite a recent CalMatters investigation found that found those agencies searched license plate readings on behalf of ICE.

Braud said the updated ALPR policy has been in place since March, which means it was in effect prior to the searches documented in the data logs reviewed by the Outpost, which covered searches conducted in June and July. Unlike the earlier version of the policy, the updated one says access to the Sheriff’s Office’s ALPR data is given to “any HCSO employees who have reason to access the ALPR system as part of their job duties.”

“This includes, but is not limited to, all ranks of Deputy Sheriff, Dispatchers, Evidence Technicians, and Crime Analysts,” the policy says.

While the new version of the Sheriff’s Office’s policy does negate some of the apparent internal rule violations we reported yesterday — for example, there’s no longer a requirement that requests to access the agency’s ALPR data be submitted in writing — the agency still appears to have violated elements of both its own policy and state law, according to the data logs we obtained through a California Public Records Act request. 

The responses we received from Braud today don’t explicitly acknowledge any violations of law or policy, but they do refer generally to potential “discipline of employees” while adding that information about such measures can’t be shared publicly.

As reported yesterday, the logs we inspected show that the Sheriff’s Office allowed nearly 300 outside law enforcement agencies to conduct hundreds of thousands of searches per month of its ALPR data, often without first obtaining legally required information such as the reason for the search and the identity of the officer conducting it.

The logs also show that outside law enforcement agencies were granted access to the Sheriff’s Office’s ALPR data even when the “Reason” entered to justify the search referred to federal agencies, including the Homeland Security Investigations Unit of the U.S. Department of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the FBI, the U.S. Marshals Service and simply “fed.”

In answer to a question about this practice, the printout we received this morning says:

Note that Humboldt County only shares with other agencies in California. There has historically been some disagreement among some agencies about their ability to work with federal agencies on task forces related to specific investigations. Flock Safety has made a number of product enhancements to address the concerns raised by this question. For example, within the state of California, if an agency conducts a license plate reader search and inputs a search reason that indicates it is related to an impermissible purpose in the state (e.g. immigration), those searches are blocked. This fall, the mandatory free text search reason field will become a mandatory offense type drop down list to address concerns about vague search reasons and bolster the system’s ability to block impermissible searches.

The Sheriff’s Office’s updated ALPR policy still says each request to access its ALPR data must include the name of the agency, the name of the person requesting the information and the intended purpose of obtaining it. Many of the searches documented in the logs we reviewed did not include that data, or the information provided was so minimal and/or vague as to appear meaningless. 

The updated policy also says each request to access the Sheriff’s Office’s ALPR data must be “reviewed by the Admins Services Bureau Manager or the authorized designee and approved before the request is fulfilled.”

When asked how Sheriff’s Office staff can ensure that searches are being conducted for legitimate law enforcement purposes, the agency said it audits the search data after the fact, as you’ll read below, where we’ve reproduced more of the questions we submitted to Lt. Conan Moore along with the responses provided by the Sheriff’s Office.

We note, however, that several of the answers appear to not exactly address the questions asked. They seem to be referencing policies in place for when the Sheriff’s Office’s own employees query the ALPR system, not when officers from outside agencies access the agency’s data, which was the intent of many of our questions. Braud said he’s researching further and will get back to us for clarification. 

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Outpost: How many Flock cameras does HCSO currently have in operation?

Sheriff’s Office: Currently we have eight full time cameras and two flex cameras that can be moved around the county for special events.

HCSO’s Policy 437 makes numerous references to an Administrative Services Bureau Commander. Is that you?

The Administrative Services Bureau Commander is Undersheriff Braud, however, control of the FLOCK system has been delegated to Lieutenant Moore. 

I understand that the access logs provided to me were collected from Flock. Does the HCSO maintain its own records of access?

No, we contract through FLOCK for our ALPR system. Our Records are stored in their system.

The office policy says, “ALPR system audits should be conducted on a monthly basis.” Is that being done? What is the process?

Yes. The administrator in charge reviews our use of the FLOCK system monthly to ensure we are following law, policy, and procedure. That information is then shared with the Sheriff.

HCSO’s policy says each written request must be “reviewed by the Operations Services Bureau Commander or the authorized designee and approved before the request is fulfilled.” Do officers seeking access to Humboldt County’s ALPR data submit access requests for each and every search? Or does the HCSO grant California law enforcement agencies default open access to its Flock camera ALPR data?

HCSO receives requests from California Law enforcement agencies detailing what they would like [us] to share. This can be [done via the] “search” feature, where an agency can put in a license plate and if it was seen on one of our cameras the agency will be notified of the date and time the license plate was hit on the camera,  [or via the] “Hotlist” feature, where a vehicle reported stolen in Humboldt County is placed into the system.

If the license plate hits one of the requested agencies cameras they are notified of the date and time of the hit and that the vehicle is reported to have been stolen out of Humboldt County.

This is basically the same thing as the DMV system that every California Law Enforcement Agency has access to. The only difference is the only thing provided is a license plate, date, time, and location of license plate. To see specific information for the license plate the officer would have to check the DMV database which is recorded by the agency on what officer made the inquiry.

HCSO’s policy also says approved requests must be retained on file. Is the office doing so? Where are these files?

Yes, HCSO retains files of who we share with. This is kept in our Flock system.

The logs released to me thus far document more than 360,000 searches from more than 280 different agencies. [Those numbers increased as more documents were released.] If these requests were not reviewed and approved individually, how can you be sure that the searches were conducted for a legitimate law enforcement purpose rather than, say, to stalk an ex or harass a neighbor, as has happened in other jurisdictions?

HCSO conducts monthly auditing. Flock has continued to enhance audit tools and will be introducing proactive audit alert tools to alert agencies about anomalous activity.

Many of these entries do not have a specific reason listed but rather just a number — apparently criminal codes and case numbers, for the most part. But many [others] entries are unclear or simply left blank. How does your office determine the legitimacy of these searches?

All entries require a cfs [call for service] or case number. Any that don’t, have [been], or will be addressed with the employees to verify they were lawful and to enforce proper documentation. Discipline of employees, if/when warranted, can’t be shared publicly.

Some reasons have been redacted. Who did those redactions and why?

Under California public records law, information related to investigations may be excluded from release. Some agencies are redacting certain information from audits for this reason.

In other cases, the listed reason is quite general, such as “investigation”/”inv”/’invest,” “patrol,” “follow up” and “criminal justice.” Are those considered sufficient justification for access?

No. All entries require a cfs or case number. Any that don’t, have [been], or will be addressed with the employees to verify they were lawful and to enforce proper documentation. Discipline of employees, if/when warranted, can’t be shared publicly.

[Senate Bill] 34 says ALPR operators and end-users must develop a usage and privacy policy, which must be conspicuously posted on their website and must contain provisions designed to “protect ALPR information from unauthorized access, destruction, use, modification, or disclosure.” Has HCSO developed such a policy? If so, where is it posted?

Our policy should be posted, and he refers to it in this inquiry. [The “he” in that sentence apparently refers to this reporter.] We don’t have a separate policy regarding this policy.

HCSO Policy 437 says an ALPR administrator “shall be responsible for developing and maintaining guidelines and procedures” that include training requirements for authorized users, procedures for maintaining records and the name and title of the person overseeing ALPR operations. Has that been done? Where are those guidelines and procedures? (They should be “conspicuously posted on the office’s website,” according to this policy.)

All of that should be included in the policy. Do you have an older version? Updating policies occurs whenever we identify things that should be changed.

Many of HCSO’s own searches of ALPR data only list “investigation” or “suspect vehicle” as the reason. Some such entries have no accompanying case number. How do you know that these searches are tied to legitimate investigations?

Per HCSO policy 437.5(b) “However, there must be a sufficient investigative reason to conduct searches using the Flock Safety ALPR database, and that reason shall be documented in the system with each individual search. A case number or call for service (CFS) number is required to justify any search and shall be entered into the database.”

This was added to the policy several months ago as we noticed the “investigation” being used in the reason. With the case number or CFS number now being mandatory we will be able to confirm the reason for the inquiry. Again, all entries require a cfs or case number. Any that don’t, have [been], or will be addressed with the employees to verify they were lawful and to enforce proper documentation. Discipline of employees, if/when warranted, can’t be shared publicly.

How many crimes has the HCSO helped to solve thanks to these Flock cameras, and how?

The most recent case I know of was the homicide in the Glendale area. This is where a subject was shot and killed near the mad river. Deputies were able to get a description of the vehicle from witnesses. ALPR data was checked with that data and the suspect vehicle was seen leaving the area on the Blue Lake camera. Detectives were able to see the license plate; conduct follow up and the two suspects were arrested and booked into the HCC on murder. There have numerous other cases from missing persons vehicles being located to stolen vehicles being located because of the ALPR hits.

Last year, Sheriff Honsal said there would be a transparency portal for this ALPR program. Is there one? Where can I find it?

https://transparency.flocksafety.com/humboldt-county-ca-so 

As we mentioned last week, the Eureka-based skywatchers at the National Weather Service are signaling that the North Coast has a wet few days to look forward to. 

Starting Friday night and continuing through Sunday before petering out Monday, heavy precipitation is expected from Del Norte all the way down to Lake County with northern Humboldt expected to receive the storm’s brunt. The NWS posted a series of handy graphics to help you wrap your head around this thing:

NWS warns that “moderate to heavy rain will cause minor rises in creeks and streams, increased risk for rock and mudslides, and ponding on roadways.” So act right.

PREVIOUSLY:

• The Humboldt County Sheriff’s Office Appears to be Violating Its Own Policy and State Law on Automated License Plate Readers 

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This story was originally published by CalMatters. Sign up for their newsletters.

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Drivers in Los Angeles County have a powerful new privacy advocate after the Board of Supervisors pushed to restrict how their license plates are scanned by law enforcement.

The board recently voted to ask the Sheriff’s Department to more stringently regulate its use of the license plate data it collects through high-tech camera systems mounted on patrol cars and above roads. The measure it approved cited reporting from CalMatters that roughly a dozen police and sheriff’s departments throughout Southern California shared such data with federal immigration agencies.

The September motion requests that the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department, which operates independently from the supervisors, conduct yearly privacy training for deputies with access to license plate cameras and that the data not be used for non-criminal immigration enforcement.

It also requests the department delete plate sightings after 60 days unless they are flagged on criminal lists.

The Sheriff’s Department “welcomes” the motion and plans to review its practices and policies, the department told CalMatters. Per the motion, deputies are to report their license plate reader policy changes to the county by January. It told the Los Angeles Times last month that it operates 931 automated readers.

Depending on the result of that report and whether Sheriff Robert Luna decides to follow the board’s direction, said Supervisor Hilda Solis, who was lead author of the legislation, supervisors may take additional action to further regulate license plate readers in L.A.

The sheriff’s department told CalMatters it has no “current” arrangements for sharing license plate data with federal agencies. A California law enacted in 2015 prohibits the sharing of plate data with out-of-state and federal entities, and requires agencies that use plate readers to have a usage and privacy policy for them.

Many of the regulations in the L.A. County motion mirror those in a piece of statewide legislation vetoed by the governor earlier this month. That measure, Senate Bill 274, sought to prevent misuse of license plate data by limiting the lists of license plates law enforcement can track and by requiring police to detail a specific case or task force use when they use data from the cameras.

Solis said she put forward her motion in part because she wanted to publicly support SB 274 before Newsom decided on it.

CalMatters did not find that the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department shared data with ICE or the Border Patrol, but some Los Angeles area agencies did. The Los Angeles Police Department declined to comment when asked about such sharing.

License plate readers “remain a powerful investigative tool for recovering stolen vehicles, identifying violent crime suspects, and finding missing persons,” supervisors wrote in a September letter urging the governor to sign SB 274 into law. But “its public support depends on confidence that the sensitive location data it generates will never be repurposed for impermissible civil immigration enforcement.”

Board Chairperson Kathryn Barger cast a lone “nay” vote against endorsing SB 274. Barger disapproved of the proposed limit on the time frame over which law enforcement agencies could retain plate data.

Barger told CalMatters she believes this time limit would have endangered the public and made it harder for police to solve crimes, and that she supports Newsom’s veto. Newsom also opposed a 60-day data retention limit in the state bill, citing similar reasons.

But that’s the same license plate data retention period followed by the California Highway Patrol, and last year the governor’s office called a 28-day retention period a balance between public safety and privacy.

“When so many of our neighbors live in fear, sharing sensitive data only increases risks.”
— Eunisses Hernández, Los Angeles City Councilmember

The L.A. County Board of Supervisors has made immigration issues a priority, fast-tracking both the license plate motion and another requesting a report on progress using new state laws to protect schools from ICE raids.

The county motion does not apply to police departments such as LAPD since they are governed by local city councils. The Los Angeles City Council has acquired about $400,000 worth of license plate reader technology for LAPD since June.

Two Los Angeles city councilmembers, Eunisses Hernández and Hugo Soto-Martínez, consistently vote against the police department’s use of license plate readers, citing concerns over their use in immigration enforcement.

“At a time when so many of our neighbors live in fear, sharing sensitive data only increases risks and erodes confidence,” Hernández wrote in a statement to CalMatters.

Law enforcement agencies using automated license plate readers throughout the state continue to break the law.

California Attorney General Rob Bonta filed a lawsuit against the El Cajon Police Department earlier this month for violating state law. Reporting by KPBS earlier this month found that this includes federal agencies like ICE. The attorney general’s office has also sent letters to 18 agencies statewide since 2024 for potential violations of state law.

Following CalMatters reporting in June, subsequent reporting by Palo Alto Online and the San Francisco Standard found that police departments in Atherton, Menlo Park, and San Francisco violated state law. In the wake of that reporting, last month Jennifer Wall, a city council member in the Bay Area city of Woodside, called on the San Mateo County Sheriff’s Office to be more transparent about how deputies conclude that searches included in quarterly reports to the council comply with local policy.

When municipalities use automated license plate reader technology, “we need to make sure it’s used appropriately and mechanisms [are] in place to ensure it’s used appropriately,” she told CalMatters. “There has to be accountability for how they’re used.”

UPDATE, 3:18 p.m.:

After this story was published, Undersheriff Justin Braud provided the Outpost with answers to the questions we submitted last month. Read more here.

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Original post:

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The Humboldt County Sheriff’s Office appears to be routinely violating its own policy and state law with its handling of information collected by automated license plate readers (ALPR). Data logs obtained by the Outpost show that the Sheriff’s Office is allowing outside law enforcement agencies to conduct hundreds of thousands of searches per month of its ALPR data, often without first obtaining legally required information such as the reason for the search and the identity of the officer conducting it.

While many of the searches list criminal codes or case numbers as the reason for accessing Humboldt County’s ALPR data, thousands of them include no justification at all, a violation of both California law and the Sheriff’s Office’s own policy. Tens of thousands of other searches were allowed despite listed reasons that contained only one- or two-digit numbers or generic terms such as “crime,” “case” or “investigation.”

Such vague justifications not only violate state law governing the handling of ALPR data, but civil liberties advocates say they fail to provide the level of accountability and transparency needed to justify the use of such surveillance technology.

The data logs reviewed by the Outpost also reveal that hundreds of searches were conducted by state and local law enforcement agencies that referenced federal agencies, including Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE), to justify accessing the information. State law expressly prohibits the sharing of such data with federal agencies, though investigations have found that this law is routinely broken.

The Outpost sent a long list of questions about these practices to the Sheriff’s Office nearly a month ago. On Sept. 30, Lt. Conan Moore, who oversees the office’s ALPR program, said via email that he was working on answering “all the questions” and would respond as soon as possible. He assured us several times since then that he was working on responses. As recently as Oct. 14, Lt. Moore said he’d try to answer the questions by the end of the day, but to date he has yet to do so. An email sent to Humboldt County Sheriff William Honsal Wednesday morning has also not received a response.

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Last year, the Humboldt County Sheriff’s Office formally launched its automated license plate reader program by announcing and explaining it at a Board of Supervisors meeting. This technology, which has grown increasingly popular among law enforcement agencies despite privacy concerns on both the left and the right, employs high-resolution cameras to record and analyze the license plates of passing vehicles along with the make, model and color of each car and other identifying features, such as scratches and dents. 

Advocates of the technology say it gives law enforcement a powerful tool to help locate criminals, stolen vehicles and missing people. Critics, meanwhile, argue that it enables a form of mass surveillance capable of tracking an individual’s movements close enough to reveal where they live, work and visit. Such technology is prone to misuse, these critics argue, particularly given the potential to target immigrant communities by sharing data with federal agencies such as ICE.

At the Board of Supervisors meeting on April 9, 2024, Sheriff Honsal and Undersheriff Justin Braud said their office would use its ALPR cameras — supplied by Atlanta-based police technology company Flock Safety — to enhance public safety while respecting the privacy rights of local residents.

However, the Outpost found that the office’s official ALPR policy contains numerous provisions that the agency is not complying with. Among those is a requirement that each request to access the Humboldt County Sheriff’s Office’s ALPR data be submitted in writing, then reviewed and approved by the administrator (or an authorized designee) before being granted. [CORRECTION: The current policy does not require requests to be submitted in writing. See our more recent post for more info.]

We asked Lt. Moore whether that’s being done, but it hardly seems possible given the volume of searches the Sheriff’s Office is allowing. Data logs obtained through a California Public Records Act request show that, in one 30-day period, from early June through early July, the Sheriff’s Office allowed more than 781,000 searches of its ALPR data, granting access to 285 different state and local agencies. That amounts to more than a thousand searches per hour, 24 hours a day.

Mass Surveillance 

Dave Maass, investigations director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), has spent more than a decade investigating the civil liberties implications of ALPR and its use by law enforcement. 

“The thing to know about license plate readers is that they’re a mass surveillance technology, and by that I mean they collect information on everyone, regardless of whether you have any nexus to a crime at the time that it’s collected,” he said in a phone interview. “That means an officer can sit down at a computer and type in your license plate and then see everywhere you’ve been seen on camera.”

Data held by Flock is typically deleted after 30 days, but there are few limits to how often the information can be accessed, and there’s lax oversight of data sharing, according to Maass.

“Given the current political climate, there are a lot of concerns about how this might be weaponized against certain targeted or vulnerable communities,” he said. “That might be ICE using it to go after migrants; it might be malicious law enforcement agencies going after journalists; it could be trying to find people who are seeking abortions or trying to get their children gender-affirming care.”

Tracy Rosenberg, advocacy director for the nonprofit group Oakland Privacy, said such concerns have been exacerbated by recent political and legal developments, including a Supreme Court decision that cleared the way for ICE to use racial profiling as grounds for immigration stops.

“A lot of these hypothetical concerns become 100 percent real right away if you are, in fact, hunting people — and the federal government is, in fact, hunting people,” Rosenberg said. “This [ALPR technology] is a really good tool to find out where they are.”

Back in February, the Eureka City Council unanimously rejected a proposal from the city’s police department to install a network of ALPR cameras after many residents said they worry the information could be obtained by federal immigration officials and used to target undocumented community members.

A decade-old California law known as Senate Bill 34 bars state law enforcement agencies from sharing license plate reader data with out-of-state public agencies or federal entities. Likewise, the 2017 California Values Act restricts state and local law enforcement agencies from using their resources for federal immigration enforcement.

“But what we’re seeing is that individual police departments are, from time to time, basically breaking that safety net,” Rosenberg said.

A 2023 investigation from civil liberties groups found that 71 California law enforcement agencies had broken SB 34. Attorney General Rob Bonta subsequently issued an advisory providing specific guidance on how state and local agencies should follow the law. He reminded them not to share ALPR data with the feds and reiterated the requirement to document the reason for their inquiries every time they access the information, as noted in a recent CalMatters story.

Still, many agencies continue to violate the law. A recent investigation by tech journalism website 404 found that ICE was accessing Flock’s nationwide network of cameras by having local law enforcement agencies search the databases on its behalf, thereby “giving federal law enforcement side-door access to a tool that it currently does not have a formal contract for,” the story found.

A subsequent CalMatters investigation in June found that Southern California police had violated state law more than 100 times in a month by sharing ALPR data with federal agents. San Francisco and Oakland also appear to have repeatedly broken state law by sharing ALPR data with federal law enforcement agencies, including the FBI and ICE, according to a recent investigation by the SF Standard.

Earlier this month, Attorney General Bonta sued the City of El Cajon, accusing its police department of repeatedly violating SB 34 by sharing ALPR data with law enforcement agencies in more than two dozen states. 

Despite such examples misuse, Governor Gavin Newsom this month vetoed a bill that would have strengthened regulations on ALPR use, saying it would have impeded criminal investigations.

Numerous law enforcement agencies alleged to be violating state law, including the El Cajon Police Department, the Oakland Police Department, the Menlo Park Police Department, the Sacramento Police Department and several SoCal agencies, have routinely been granted access to the Humboldt County Sheriff’s Office’s ALPR data.

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While there’s no indication from the logs we reviewed that the Sheriff’s Office is sharing its ALPR data directly with federal agencies, it appears to be allowing outside agencies to do so routinely. 

The logs, which are maintained by Flock, document every time the data captured by our local sheriff’s offices cameras is accessed, whether by outside agencies or local officers and deputies. Each entry is supposed to identify the requesting officer and agency, the reason for the request, the timeframe being searched, the date and time of submission and the number of Flock networks included in the search, but, as detailed below, they often don’t.

But when reasons do get listed, they are often the names or acronyms of federal agencies. For example, we found a dozen entries listing HSI, which refers to ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations unit, according to Maass. Another 93 searches listed the FBI. More than 70 others listed USMS (the U.S. Marshals Service) and nine simply listed “fed.”

Insufficient Documentation

In the logs obtained by the Outpost, more than 2,200 searches left the “Reason” field blank. Tens of thousands of others entries listed reasons so vague (“investigation,” “suspect,” “case,” “law enforcement,” “criminal justice,” etc.) that they could apply to virtually any investigation. (Meanwhile, in the documents turned over to us, more than 400 entries in the “Reason” field had been partially or completely redacted. It’s not clear who made the redactions or why.)

Rosenberg said such entries violate both the spirit and the letter of SB 34.

“Although that state law is not, shall we say, super specific, it’s fairly clear that what they meant [by “Reason”] was an identifiable purpose that could be articulated and identified in the interests of basically any kind of audit or review,” she told the Outpost. “The primary problem with writing something like ‘criminal justice,’ which, as far as I know, is an academic field of study, [is that] it doesn’t tell you anything. … Nobody knows [what it means] except the individual who just put that entry into the journal. And if enough time goes by and they’ve done a number of these, they won’t even remember!”

Even the entries that list case numbers or codes likely don’t comply with state law, she said. 

“It makes it very difficult for anyone who is auditing, reviewing [or] supervising unless there’s a standardized way for doing this,” she said. “Do these codes mean exactly the same thing at each department? … The penal code does, but some of these references don’t match up to the Penal Code. They’re just numbers and letters or somebody’s initials or whatever.”

Other entries in the logs turned over by the county don’t identify the officer who conducted the search of its data. Thousands list only a single letter in the “Name” field. At least three dozen searches conducted by the Northern California Regional Intelligence Center put the number 4 in the “Name” field. Seven searches by the Fullerton Police Department listed just a period.

Without the ability to trace who accessed this data and why, it’s impossible to know whether the searches were done for legitimate law enforcement purposes, Rosenberg said. Sometimes they’re not.

For example, a 29-year-old fitness influencer in Riverside County is suing the county sheriff’s department, alleging that after meeting one of its deputies at a festival in 2023, the officer used his law-enforcement access to stalk her, running database searches, tracking her movements and showing up at her house, making her feel unsafe.

In a similar case, the author of SB 34, former State Sen. Jerry Hill and his wife hired a private investigator to pull information from a Sacramento ALPR database regarding Hill’s spouse. The investigator obtained a photo of her car outside an area gym, the Los Angeles Times reported. 

“My wife is an ordinary citizen, and the database was used to track her down,” he told the paper. “Anybody could abuse the power too easily, and that’s the genesis behind SB 34. It’s too easy for bad actors to help themselves to data.”

But even that state law is not preventing abuses, according to civil liberties groups including the ACLU. 

Rosenberg said the growing ubiquity of ALPR technology only increases privacy concerns.

“When there were only 10 percent or 20 percent of police departments using Flock equipment, it was more anecdotal, right?” she said. “But now that we are at, like, 85 percent saturation and growing — and police departments that have these cameras are getting more and more and more of them — it’s becoming a much more invasive and comprehensive surveillance technology.”

Other Policy Violations

The only ALPR policy available on the Humboldt County Sheriff’s Office’s website that the Outpost could located is this one, which is buried deep on page 498 of the office’s policies and procedures manual. It appears to be a boilerplate document based on a template employed by many other law enforcement agencies in the state, and it contains multiple provisions that the Sheriff’s Office does not appear to be following.

For example, it quotes a California Civil Code section that says all ALPR users must “develop a usage and privacy policy, which must be conspicuously posted on their website, and must contain provisions designed to “protect ALPR information from unauthorized access, destruction, use, modification, or disclosure.”

If the Humboldt County Sheriff’s Office has developed such a policy, it is not posted conspicuously on its website. Attorney General Bonta reiterated in his 2023 guidance to law enforcement agencies:

Inclusion of such a policy in a manual, without noting on the main web page of their agency the existence of and/or link to such a policy, may not satisfy SB 34’s requirement that such policies be “posted conspicuously on that Internet Web site.”

Furthermore, both the Sheriff’s Office’s policy and state law say that the administrator of each agency’s ALPR system shall develop guidelines and procedures that include, among other things:

• the name and title of the person overseeing the ALPR program,
• training requirements for all authorized users, and
• a description of how the ALPR system will be monitored “to ensure the security of the information and compliance with applicable privacy laws.”

The Humboldt County Sheriff’s Office does not appear to have done so.

The policy also says ALPR system audits should be conducted on a monthly basis. We could find no evidence that the Sheriff’s Office is conducting such audits. 

When Sheriff Honsal and Undersheriff Braud announced its ALPR program to the Board of Supervisors last year, Braud said, “This type of technology is going to do nothing but improve our ability to serve the constituents of this county, and also do it in a way that respects their privacy and their rights to not be infringed upon.”

Honsal told the board that his office would soon implement a “transparency portal” for its ALPR program so that the community could track how the technology is being used. 

“The transparency portal that we’re going to have is going to provide that information to the public to say, ‘This is how we’ve utilized the technology, these are the successes of the technology,’ and hopefully we can see that grow, and that would be the ultimate goal,” Honsal said.

More than a year and a half later, no such portal has been made available to the public.

Among the questions we submitted to Lt. Moore was whether a transparency portal exists and why the Humboldt County Sheriff’s Office appears to not be complying with several elements of state law and its own policy. We will update readers when and if anyone from the office responds. 

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This story was originally published by CalMatters. Sign up for their newsletters.

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Can President Donald Trump call up the National Guard to enter a city even if the governor of that state says no?

This basic question is under litigation across several federal courts in three states and is now before the U.S. Supreme Court. It has even more urgency now that Trump plans to send Department of Homeland Security personnel to San Francisco tomorrow, a move Gov. Gavin Newsom said is a precursor to the president’s sending in the National Guard. Trump said the city has a high crime rate and needs federal protection. City officials say crime is down.

“This is right out of the dictator’s handbook. Donald Trump does this over and over again,” the governor said in a social media post. Newsom said before Trump can summon the National Guard, he needs to sow anxiety in the streets so he can then “solve for that” with federal troops.

Before news broke of federal agents arriving in San Francisco, California Attorney General Rob Bonta sat down with CalMatters today to talk about Trump’s use of the National Guard.

“It would be dangerous and wrongly decided to allow the president to do what he’s trying to do now, which is to act as if he’s above the law, act as if he’s a king, treat the National Guard as his royal guard,” he said. “He will deploy only to blue cities. He will use it to punish enemies. He will use it to target those people who didn’t support him.”

Already Trump has issued an executive order directing Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth to establish a new “standing National Guard quick reaction force” for “rapid nationwide deployment,” California Department of Justice lawyers wrote to Supreme Court justices in a legal filing.

Already, federal courts are dealing with questions of the legality of sending state National Guard troops to Chicago, Los Angeles and Portland — cities in which the state attorneys general sued the Trump administration.

California is central to the national issue

Bonta is a key player in that Blue State resistance. His team was the first to challenge Trump on taking over control of the state National Guard under a rarely used law that allows the president to do this in times of invasion, internal rebellion or when U.S. laws cannot be executed with “regular forces” — a contested term.

California is ground-zero for this novel dispute. This is where Trump mobilized 4,000 of the state’s National Guard troops in June in response to two days of occasionally violent protests against federal immigration raids in the Los Angeles region.

Prior to Trump’s federalization of those troops in June, at no time in U.S. history was the law invoked without the consent of the state governor. Use of the law is exceedingly rare: It was used just once before June by President Richard Nixon to mobilize troops during a postal worker strike in 1970.

Bonta joined Oregon in suing Trump to halt him from sending the National Guard from Oregon, California and Texas to Portland, the site of sporadic protests. And California has filed legal briefings siding with Illinois to district and appellate courts, as well as the Supreme Court.

Frustratingly for the public, there’s no final answer in the near term. Instead, lawyers from liberal states suing the Trump administration are stuck in a standoff with Department of Justice attorneys defending the White House’s decisions. Each side has notched a roughly even collection of procedural victories and defeats with no sign of resolution.

Even a decision from the nation’s highest court — issued from the so-called shadow docket — will likely be preliminary and prompt new iterations of legal challenges as the merits of this fundamental question inch upward through the courts.

Adding to the confusion, most of the legal decisions and appeals about the president’s powers to take over the National Guard deal with temporary orders or preliminary injunctions. Only one court has answered a portion of the major issues around Trump’s powers — whether the National Guard and military can conduct law enforcement activities, and if so, what are the limits of those abilities.

In Bonta’s view and what California has argued in the courts, decisions siding with Trump could mean that the National Guard, controlled by the U.S. military, could accompany IRS officials on routine audits. It could mean armed forces at polling places on election day.

A lower court judge sided with California, but the 9th Circuit Court agreed with the Trump administration to stay that injunction.

That question of the law enforcement powers isn’t before the Supreme Court, but it may get there soon.

Federal government says courts can’t second-guess Trump

Attorneys for the federal government have been consistent in maintaining that judges cannot even review the president’s decisions to federalize a state’s National Guard troops. However, California state attorneys wrote to the Supreme Court that “every court to consider the question has rejected that argument.”

So far district court judges in California, Oregon and Illinois have agreed with Bonta and his Democrat counterparts. But twice already a panel of judges on the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals that oversees the western states disagreed. They said the level of protest in the streets rises to rebellion and an inability for the federal government to conduct its operations.

Two sets of judges on the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals homed in on the level of violence in Portland and Los Angeles outside of federal immigration facilities. They suggested the unrest was significant enough to impede federal operations, blocking lower court decisions that sided with California and Oregon lawyers. At one point the Portland facility was closed for over three weeks, one of the judge panels noted.

Some of the judges overseeing the cases have questioned whether the administration’s evidence is reliable. “In addition to demonstrating a potential lack of candor by these affiants, it also calls into question their ability to accurately assess the facts,” Judge April M. Perry wrote. She’s a Biden appointee.

She also noted a “a troubling trend of Defendants’ declarants equating protests with riots.”

The 7th Circuit Court of Appeals largely sided with Perry in her temporary restraining order blocking Trump from sending National Guard troops to the Chicago area. The White House appealed, and now that’s before the Supreme Court.

Lawyers for the federal government wrote to the Supreme Court that Perry’s order blocking Trump from deploying the National Guard to the Chicago area “downplays or denies the ongoing threat to the lives and safety of federal agents, substitutes the court’s own judgment for the president’s about the need for military augmentation, and gives little or no weight to the United States’ interest in enforcing federal immigration law.”

Meanwhile, Bonta is troubled by the administration’s arguments that unrest in June can justify new and continued deployment of the National Guard months later. “It just doesn’t make any sense,” he said. His legal team has written that there needs to be a limit for how long the National Guard can be deployed if the violence that prompted their federalization has subsided.

Bonta is ready if Trump sends troops to Bay Area

Still, Bonta permits that of the three cities at the focus of the federal lawsuits over Trump’s ability to send the National Guard — Chicago, Los Angeles and Portland — “I’d say the federal government had their strongest case in L.A.”

But is what occurred in Los Angeles a form of rebellion? Not according to Bonta.

“Rebellion is a violent effort to overthrow the government,” he said. The violence against federal buildings and immigration law enforcement facilities in the cities Trump targeted “isn’t good,” but it’s not a government overthrow.”

“The trivializing of these very important words with high standards by the federal government, it is being done on purpose,” he said. The Trump administration “calls seemingly everything an emergency or rebellion or invasion,” including illegal immigration. “But that’s not what it is.”

While Bonta said he considered trying to preempt the president’s use of armed forces in San Francisco, the technicalities of the federal court system don’t let his team sue until the troops arrive. Yesterday he and Newsom said they’re ready to sue if Trump does that.

“It’s difficult to do something preemptively,” Bonta told CalMatters.

With broken hearts we announce the passing of Brooke “Brooklynn” Emily Jackson. She left us peacefully on Friday, October 3, at 11:11 a.m., surrounded by her family in Eureka.

Brooke was born in Eureka on July 8, 1998 at the old General Hospital in the presence of her beloved aunt, Amy Miller, and her then three-month-old cousin, Cassidy Bailey. Her mother Sarah brought her home to big sister, Elizabeth, the next day. She was a happy and fearless child, always smiling and sticking up for her friends in their neighborhood on 15th Street. She attended Back Yard Preschool, and then Freshwater Elementary School. She moved with her family to the Freshwater School District before middle school. She cheered for youth football from the age of 7, and attended ballet and gymnastic classes. Brooke attended Arcata High School where she also cheered and made many friends. She graduated from Arcata High School in 2016.

She grew to be a stunning beauty under the Humboldt redwoods, where she loved to swim in the rivers and lakes. She enjoyed picking up pretty rocks on the local beaches. Brooke also traveled to her grandmother Nanci’s home in Mexico to enjoy the beaches there, and to Hawaii to learn to surf and vacation with family.

She was incredibly proud to become a auntie when Tobi, and then Kylah were born. She helped with their care and feeding while living in Arcata with her big sister then in Redding, briefly, after her sister moved. She attended Fredrick and Charles Beauty College, and she worked at Angels of Hope and Luis’s in her early adult life. She loved and rescued animals, including her beloved dog Srewie and cat Rico.

Brooklynn will be remembered as someone who brightened up every room she entered, brought hope and comfort to her freinds, and as a wildly hilarious soul.

She was preceded into the afterlife, by her father, Robert Jackson, and his parents Ron and Sue Todd, and her grandfather, Griff Savage. Those who survive are her mother, Sarah Jackson, grandmother Nanci Savage, sisters, Eliza Jackson, Toni Pico, and Emmi Ruiz, soul-sister Willow Wakanwolf, brothers Reid and Ryan Jackson, her niece Kylah Boazman and nephew Tobi Boazman, aunt Amy Miller, Uncle Roger Miller, cousins Cassidy Bailey, Ciara Miller, and Caley Miller.

A memorial will be held for her at the Wharfinger Building on Saturday, October 25, at 1 p.m. Please consider bringing a donation for the Redwood Renewal Foundation to honor her memory.

Brooklyn was beautiful and wonderful and brave and strong and smart and funny and happy and good, and we loved her very, very much.

Robert F. Wallace, Ph.D
“World traveler”

Robert Frank Wallace (aka “Frank Bob”, only his Sister called him this, but I love it!), “Frank” in his younger years, born on May 26, 1944, in Alabama, raised in Tennessee; passed September 17, 2025 in Eureka.

An anxious knock on the door and I hear the call to “come in”.

I’m greeted cheerfully, by the most child-like smile on a face that’s been weathered by the hands of time. Already penning down a list of things for me to take care of, Bob had a certain preciseness about him, and his mind was just as sharp as his yesterdays. First impressions are always lasting, walking into the place, I couldn’t help but gaze in wonderment. I started asking questions because the house was filled with so many unique objects. He told me, “I’m an open book.” We instantly got along very well, with similar views and interests. In my work, I’m usually taking care of plants or cutting grass. This did not feel like work at all, but more like the unveiling of a history.

An aura of solace surrounded this person who had lived a great life of diversity. This wasn’t about cleaning someone’s house or preparing a meal for a stranger, in those hours, time stood still with intent.This new uncharted assignment was well understood. With my whole heart, I truly wanted to hear the journey that brought “this respected elder” to their final destination. With the first questions asked, I knew he was just as eager to walk down this lane of memories with me. Life can often be uplifted by intersecting paths that cross for a fleeting moment with a huge purpose. This is the story of my Dad’s old friend, and my new friend, Bob.

Intelligence, determination, and perseverance allowed Bob to overcome many challenges early on in order to succeed in life. Bob told me that he avoided spending time with his “narcissistic” mother at the very early age of 7, when he started working in his father’s hardware store. He would make a dollar if he worked the entire day and many times, he would take his earnings over to the local bank to get rolls of pennies, to find anything unique. Bob told me that watching the different types of currency going in and out of the store cash register is what sparked his interest in coin collecting, geography and travel. Unfortunately, Bob’s younger sister wasn’t able to tag along to the hardware store and they didn’t get to spend much time together as kids. Learning isolation techniques at an early age may have contributed to his introverted ways.

Bob’s nose was always in a book, absorbing information. Taking education seriously, it was in his early twenties that he earned a master’s degree in Science from Florida State University. Five years later he earned a masters in Philosophy, and the following year a masters in Psychology, both from UC San Diego. Self-diagnosed with Aspergers (ASD), Bob was able to soar into his own personal interests. During the years of popular magazines, Bob told me he had 12 different technology subscriptions at one time! He was heavily invested in a certain tech company, and probably one of the most digitally fluent 81-year-olds I’ve ever met. He sent me emails from his favorite YouTube Chef, Jean Pierre, favorite musician, Beth Hart, favorite podcast, The Bulwark.

Another of Bob’s passions was humanitarianism. He told me how he made a point to donate to organizations that are addressing the carbon footprint of humanity, himself included. For decades, he gave funds to tree planting efforts outside of the U.S. This inspired many trips over the years because he really wanted to see with his own eyes if that money was being allocated properly. That’s why Bob would travel to certain parts of the world and witness the growth being made. He told me that it felt so nice that he was contributing to this cause that made a real impact on the less fortunate parts of the world.

Somewhere around 1990, Bob (aka), “Captain Raintree”, took up living on and sailing a yacht for five years. Cruising up and down the Panama canal, visiting countless island destinations, becoming a member of as many yacht clubs as possible. Postcards were his thing! Sending and receiving generous stories of adventure as in one postcard from the Himalayan mountains Bob wrote, “It’s not fun being knee-deep in snow, wearing only your Birkenstocks.” He was trying to plan an exit from the summit and having a hard time finding a crew to get him down the mountain. Bob told me of a scary moment when the exhaust system on his yacht became clogged and a backdraft of carbon monoxide began seeping into the vessel while he was asleep. Miraculously, a loud noise from the critters that caused the clog in the first place woke him up just in time to escape. I believe that’s what ended his days as a lone captain. This story had us cracking up and made me think of cartoon chipmunks causing chaos.

After all of this, he purchased a plot of land in far Northern California on a secluded dirt road, off the grid. This is where he built a spectacular homestead from the knowledge attained through DIY construction books and magazines. Although the home was slightly unfinished on the inside, it was so beautiful, and so unique, with built in cabinetry everywhere. Windows at every corner of the eye, super structurally-sound, unlike a lot of (DYI) cabins around Humboldt that are minimally built. For decades, Bob woke up to beautiful cascading views of Chalk Mountain during the spring, summer and fall of each year. The winter months sent him traveling as far away as possible, reaching all the destinations that he had dreamed of from those childhood books and coins.

Bob told me that, eight months previous to the cancer diagnosis, he was reflooring his apartment in Italy, soaking up information through any number of devices with a Wi-Fi connection, and making his way around very well. Two rounds of chemotherapy drastically reduced the quality of life that he’d always known. Bob told me,”I’ve lived an amazing life up until the chemo.” I think it was the moment of realization that he would never get that quality of life back that he decided to be at peace with the process. I was there when they gave him the news that it was not months that he had left, but only weeks and I didn’t really want to accept the truth that Bob needed to hear. He actually made me feel better about his situation by telling me stories and achievements from his past.

In Bob’s words, “look around here, every relic in this house holds a memory and a story behind it.” He kept asking me to grab things, like an eager child with a big smile! I would happily rush off and get whatever item he asked for. He would look over each item knowing that this would be the last time he would see them. Connecting the relic to the memory was very touching to watch and I enjoyed listening to all of the stories. (Bob kept every slip of paper from every port where he harbored, every flight, currency exchanged, etc, nothing was left undocumented) I wasn’t afraid to ask the difficult questions and he was glad to answer. There were a few romantic interest stories from long ago, some sad and others happy. Coincidentally, with the same name as my own mother, Bob talked joyfully about the one that got away. A life of solitude isn’t for everyone, but this was absolutely the life for “Frank” Bob.

All anyone can hope for is a peaceful voice surrounding you in the final moments when uncertainty becomes realization. What a great honor for me to be the person he needed in these very real and final moments when his quality of life took a dramatic shift. My hope is that Bob was able to visualize a clear path through the breezy redwood forest of fully blooming huckleberry and into the brightest light of the universe, exactly where he needed to be …

I’ve tried to share (to the best of my ability) with the world the amazing life story of my friend, (world traveler, Frank) Bob Wallace, whose life might have otherwise sifted through the hourglass of time and into the unknown.

When my dad and I were helping clear out the ranch house after Bob passed, we realized that Bob kept nearly everything he ever touched that meant something to him. This made it quite difficult to just get rid of it all. We had the dumpster and were tossing all of the funky things in and packing other stuff to be donated or saved. There was this box that had a jingle to it and I figured we should save this one. Bob had given my youngest son (also obsessed with foreign currency/geography) a collection of coins, before he passed. Days later, I realized this box held some of Bob’s most treasured moments from his worldly travels, a few little notepads with every country, and all the food he ate, passports, postcards, letters of love, yacht club memberships, ticket stubs, museum visit stamp cards, endless tiny strips of foreign paper. Everything was meant to be found in that box for a reason.

There’s a story to be told in every corner of the world, no matter how small your circle becomes. What an extraordinary life of adventure, romance, and mystery, as he traveled the world and studied the lives of others with a true passion. In passing, Bob left behind very generous donations to several organizations that not only benefit his local community but across the globe. “Frank Bob” is survived by his sister Jan and brother-in-law Billy Vallely and their children. Thank you, Jan, for giving me some of these special worldly trinkets that hold stories and memories of an incredible life filled with such love for adventure and solitude. And a very special thank you to Hospice of Humboldt for providing immediate end of life care.

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