Surveillance Today

Where an agency has been made to count, the counts are large. The LAPD’s plate readers took 210.6 million reads in two months, and 161 of its alerts named cars that were not stolen. Orange County’s cameras were searched 2,144,138 times in four months, protest searches among them, as Issue No. 2 reported. The LAPD ran its cell-site simulators 21 times in four months of 2012, and searched faces nearly 30,000 times in eleven years.

Where no one has made it count, there is nothing. The Sheriff publishes no count of cell-site simulator uses, no count of phones copied, no count of Cobwebs searches and no list of the agencies that receive his plate data. The Board’s grant letter names the Israeli tools without prices. The fusion center has acknowledged none of ten public records requests filed on MuckRock. The only office ordered to watch it was locked out in 2022 and cut by a third in 2025.

The Sheriff’s policy says the cell-site simulator “shall not be used to target First Amendment activities, such as protests and gatherings at places of worship.” Cobwebs says it tracks only criminals and terrorists. JINSA says its trips focus on management and policy, not tactics. Palantir’s chief executive, Alex Karp: “We are the single worst technology to use to abuse civil liberties.” None of these statements comes with a count, an audit or a log that a resident can check.

The rest of the country is pulling back. More than fifty towns dropped their plate-reader vendor in the past year. Florida barred plate readers from its state highways. San Francisco’s own audit found 299 improper federal searches of its plate data, run through its fusion center. The Senate held a hearing in September that Flock, Axon, Motorola and Verkada declined to attend.

New York built its tie to Israel in the open. The NYPD has posted an officer in Israel since 2007, at the Israel National Police headquarters in Kfar Saba since 2012, and he is still there under the city’s new mayor; the department contracts with Terrogence, founded by veterans of the Israeli army’s intelligence corps. Los Angeles built its version on grants, sole-source contracts and a fusion center whose files no one outside it has read.

What the County has paid in total for Israeli-made tools; how many times the Sheriff has used the cell-site simulator, and on whom; what replaces the $6.3 million Palantir bridge contract, held by Pat V. Mack, Inc., when it ends Nov. 30; and how many LAPD officers trained in Israel, and what they were taught. Each is a record the County or the City holds. None has been published.

Procurement is an act of intent: no agency buys this equipment to let it gather dust. Who it is pointed at is split between the records forced into the light and the ones still withheld.

ALADS worked without a contract from Jan. 31, 2025. In January 2026 the County was offering 0% through 2026 with a clause letting it claw back raises in a shortfall, and two members of Congress wrote to both sides urging a deal. By early August, ALADS had ratified one. PPOA’s newsletter describes the terms the County put on every table this round: a cost-of-living adjustment and a “critical shortage” pay-range adjustment, both retroactive to July 1, 2026; further adjustments on July 1, 2027, and 2028; and signing cash, $5,000 in year two and $2,000 on Board approval. PPOA credits Sheriff Luna with securing the shortage adjustment. The County has not published the percentages or the contract’s cost. The LAist voter guide still says the County is “currently bargaining.”

So the union is asking voters to take the Board’s final say on deputy pay away two months after it won a retroactive contract with that final say in place.

On Feb. 27, 2025, the Civilian Oversight Commission subpoenaed records on the death of A.G., 18, and the beatings of E.B. and J.P. Sheriff Luna sued to block the subpoenas. ALADS and PPOA filed unfair-labor-practice charges. In April 2026 the County settled by stipulating that it had committed a labor violation, and the subpoenas were withdrawn. Nothing in Measure A touches the Commission’s subpoena power on paper. Nothing in the labor charges did either.

What an arbitration panel could not decide matters as much as what it could. It would rule on wages, hours and benefits. Not on who the fusion center watches, how long plate scans are kept, who the Department shares its 931 readers with, or whether the Commission will ever get the A.G., E.B. and J.P. records. Those stayed with the Board, which has never voted on them, and with the Sheriff, whom no one in this campaign has asked.

Two documents a voter would want before Nov. 3 are the Auditor-Controller’s full fiscal statement and the Board letter approving the August contract, with its percentages and cost. The first is in the voter guide. The second has not been posted.

In October 2022, twelve days before the County’s audit of the fusion center came back, Sheriff Villanueva barred Inspector General Max Huntsman from Department records and buildings, as Issue No. 2 reported. The Department’s deputy gangs, which a state law now bans, grew under his watch and his denials; the Banditos case alone settled for $8 million. His Public Corruption Unit opened investigations of his critics, including a member of the Board of Supervisors, the Inspector General and a Los Angeles Times reporter; the state Attorney General took the matter over. He refused the Oversight Commission’s subpoenas and was ordered to appear. He says the cost of litigation against the Department is the fault of the Board and the oversight bodies for an “extensive campaign to falsely claim deputy gangs were running roughshod.”

Sheriff Luna ran in 2022 as the reformer. In February 2025 the Oversight Commission subpoenaed the A.G., E.B. and J.P. records; he sued to block the subpoenas, and after the unions filed labor charges the County withdrew them. Under a June 2025 Board memo the Inspector General stopped responding to the scenes of deputy shootings; the office went to none of the four shootings in the first quarter of 2026. In September 2025 the Board cut a third of the Inspector General’s staff. The Department runs 931 plate readers; the Board’s request that it delete scans after sixty days is advisory, and the Sheriff’s report on it has not been published. The fusion center’s Palantir contract ran through May 2025, and there is no public record of a renewal. The deputies’ unions credit Luna with winning them the “critical shortage” raise in August.

No voter guide this paper has read, LAist’s and La Defensa’s among them, mentions the fusion center, the plate readers, the Real-Time Watch Center or the Department’s data sharing. Neither candidate has volunteered a position. The five questions a voter could put to either are here.

The first is a ten-year, $235 million renewal that puts Axon cameras able to read plates in more than 1,600 patrol cars. The second is a three-month pilot, at no cost to the city, of Axon readers mounted on streetlights. The pilot’s memorandum lists its camera locations as “[TBD].” It sets no retention period; “LAPD’s retention schedule governs.” Deletion does not apply to data “held within another Axon product,” and Axon must keep “raw image or video frames.” Section 7.9 gives Axon an “unconditional right to share” with “authorized governmental or private bodies” and requires it to connect the data to “fusion centers and joint task force systems.” California’s plate-reader law, Civil Code section 1798.90.55(b), permits sharing only with other California public agencies, and the Attorney General’s 2023 bulletin says no private, federal or out-of-state sharing. The usage policy the law requires is to be written “before activation.”

San Francisco shows what the fusion-center clause produces. Its police department’s own audit, released June 17, 2026, found 299 improper queries of its plate-reader data by federal agencies, the DEA, the IRS and the U.S. Marshals among them, run through the Bay Area fusion center. Two lawsuits followed; one alleges 1.6 million out-of-state searches.

On Oct. 2 Councilmembers Hugo Soto-Martínez and Marqueece Harris-Dawson moved to take the streetlight pilot under the Council’s review, under Charter Section 245. On Oct. 6 the Council adopted the motion, 10–4, with one member absent. On Oct. 20 the Public Safety Committee voted to recommend a veto of the Commission’s action. On Oct. 21 the Council continued the item to Oct. 27, 10–0, the last day it can act under the Charter (Council File 26-1394). Every public comment in the file opposed the memorandum, including the League of Women Voters of Greater Los Angeles, the Black Alliance for Just Immigration, Alliance for a Better Community and the California Immigrant Policy Center. If it does not act by then, the Commission’s approval stands.

Measure LA would let the city buy a maker’s own software without competitive bidding. Axon’s body cameras, evidence system and plate readers are one maker’s software. Measure EE would end the Police Commission’s power to stop its Inspector General’s audits. The Inspector General’s plate-reader audit was the one the Commission voted against ten weeks after reading it.