Date: 11/29/2023
Subject: Welcome to Kensington
From: The Memo Desk

Is Kensington ready for 24/7 surveillance cameras?

A presentation was made during the 11/09/23 Kensington Police Protection & Community Services District meeting to consider installing surveillance cameras at the entrances to our bucolic hillside village. Police Chief Gancasz presented a proposal for purchasing a small number of license plate recognition cameras from Flock Safety, an Atlanta based company.

The proposal would consider locating about 5 license plate recognition (LPR) cameras at the main entry points from Berkeley and El Cerrito. Both of those municipalities use Flock Safety surveillance equipment. After a one-year trial period the results would be reviewed to see if the LPR cameras were effective in lowering Kensington’s crime rate and justifying the cost.

During the Flock Safety’s presentation, a representative of the company made several claims about the dramatic reduction in crime rates from communities that had Flock’s products in place. When questioned about the method employed to determine the impact Flock’s surveillance systems had on the reduced crime rates it turned out the claims were over stated.

LPR video cameras are capable of not only “reading” a vehicle’s license plate, they can record the vehicle’s make and color along with other unique features such as decals and bumper stickers. Under some conditions LPR video cameras can also “see” people in the vehicle. The potential of privacy issue abuses could lead to legal problems for the district. LPR video systems have a high error rate. They rely on machine learning and the system gets “smarter” the more real-world data points it collects. But as the driverless car programs in San Francisco have shown, the machine learning approach does have some serious drawbacks. They make mistakes and the mistakes get perpetuated. The algorithms that run these systems tend to reflect the bias and stereotypes that the programmers may have. As the old saying goes; garbage in, garbage out.

Undoubtedly our professional Kensington Police Department would be in favor of having the Flock system be installed. They see it as another useful high-tech tool for acquiring evidence to help fight crime. But these systems come with their own set of problems such as how long the data is stored and who can access the information. So…who’s zoomin’ who?

“We must free ordinary Americans from the constant surveillance and manipulation of the tech giants.” (Josh Hawley)

Note: Satire alert; welcome to Kensington, Big Brother is watching you.