Grand Jury Questions Surveillance Of Santa Cruz County Residents

SANTA CRUZ, CA — The sheriff's office need to be more accountable and transparent about their surveillance of the public, according to a report released Tuesday by the Santa Cruz County Civil Grand Jury.

The report — 'Surveillance State in Santa Cruz County — Who surveils those who surveil us?" — focuses on the Santa Cruz County Sheriff's Office.

The grand jury, a panel convened annually in each county around the state to investigate and report on local government operations, attempted to recognize the appropriate balance between the required secrecy of law enforcement investigations and public transparency, according to the report.

"Just as critical to know how and when surveillance tools will be used, it is equally important to understand the limits of surveillance, and hold authorities accountable to those limitations," reads the report.

Law enforcement agencies use technologies like Amazon Ring, a security device company known for video doorbells for households, to request footage from users. There was a more than fivefold increase in law enforcement partnerships on the company's platform since November 2019, according to Amazon.

Other surveillance technologies include automated license plate readers, body-worn cameras, and mobile device forensic tools that let investigators get data from a smartphone and can access locked devices to bypass pattern, password, or PIN locks, overcome encryption, as well as retrieve cloud tokens and select app data.

In 2021, the Santa Cruz County Criminal Justice Council — created over 30 years ago to increase coordination and cooperation between local criminal justice partners — issued a Santa Cruz County regional public safety agency policy review, showcasing the surveillance policies and offering a starting point for evaluation by local law enforcement, elected leaders and the communities they serve, according to the report.

The council report indicated jurisdictions had dissimilar or incomplete policies for the purchase and use of technology for law enforcement surveillance.

The report and the development of privacy and surveillance rules in several counties and cities in California inspired the civil grand jury to understand how law enforcement uses surveillance technologies and how the public can promote greater clarity on their use while keeping in mind the investigative needs of the police.

A 2019 state audit of local law enforcement agencies' use of license plate readers found the Los Angeles Police Department and three other California agencies were not providing sufficient privacy protections for the hundreds of millions of images collected by the automated license plate readers and shared with other jurisdictions.

Though the Santa Cruz County Sheriff's Office reports no use of license plate readers, the jury is concerned that certain protocols should be in place should they decide to do so. They also used the report as an example of poor oversight and privacy protections in the use of plate readers.

The state audit found that 99.9 percent of the 320 million images the LAPD stored came from vehicles that were not on a criminal investigation list when the reader's image was made.
According to the grand jury report, these findings demonstrate the need for public oversight of surveillance technologies.

The report recommends the sheriff's office take the following steps:
-Give details on how long data will be kept and when it will be deleted or disposed of because of the rising amount of non-evidentiary data, such as public event drone recordings.
-Consider using the state-mandated military equipment inventory -- a list of military equipment used by police that is mandated by law to be reported to oversight bodies such as city councils and board of supervisors in California -- to give the public information on surveillance equipment being proposed or acquired by the sheriff's office. For example, requests for license plate readers should be included along with military equipment requests.
-Publish its statistics on the use of people's Ring cameras annually.
-Clean up confusing language about surveillance methods in its policy manual.
-Tell the public if mobile device forensic tools are used during "consent searches," which means no warrant needed.
-Consider a documented process for handling the inadvertent recording of privileged communications, including inmate tablet use.

The Grand Jury reduced the investigation's scope because though these technologies are used by law enforcement throughout the county, the Santa Cruz County Board of Supervisors is limited in its supervisory capacity over the sheriff's office.

According to the report, a response is required from the Santa Cruz County Sheriff's Office and invited from the Santa Cruz County Public Defender's Office and a Santa Cruz County administrative officer.

Comments from those county officials were not immediately available.

The report is available online.