Andrew Crocker
Role at the time: Surveillance litigation director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, co-counsel for the plaintiffs, interviewed by KQED
Response to this claim
San Jose police searches of the city's stored license plate reader data without a warrant violate the California Constitution's protection against unreasonable searches and seizures (article I, section 13) and its right to privacy (article I, section 1).
“Clearly these cities are recognizing there’s a problem, and I don’t think that restrictions like this are going to solve that problem. Really any use of ALPRs is harmful, and the only way to stop the risk of this kind of abuse is to end their use in these cities ... Short of that, they could get a warrant, they could go before a court and present probable cause to run these searches, which is what we’re seeking in this lawsuit ... San José has not done that. San Francisco has not done that. So it’s insufficient, and it’s very likely that we will see further abuse of these systems.”
KQED's report on the October 2 ruling. It quotes an emailed statement from City Attorney Susana Alcala Wood and an interview with Andrew Crocker of the Electronic Frontier Foundation given on October 5, and it describes the city's 2026 limits on the cameras and the separate federal lawsuit against the city.
Why we used this label
The reference point is the San Jose Police Department's practice of querying the city's stored license plate reader data without a warrant. Crocker calls the city's restrictions insufficient and says police should go before a court and present probable cause before running these searches, which criticizes the warrantless practice, so we used Condemned. The closest competing label is Mixed or conditional, because he offers a warrant requirement as a fallback to ending the cameras' use; it loses because both options reject the current practice.