San Diego PD’s Controversial Smart Streetlight Project – What’s Changed?

Bring information together to enhance investigation efficiency and safety. Those were the goals of San Diego's Police Department when deploying their latest smart solution on streetlights. The city is the second largest in California by land area, occupying a large space in the south, touching the border and spanning also towards the north. And with this widespread geography, the police department faced a siloed system in terms of information. How do we start bridging our departments, our divisions, and start bringing all that information together so that we're not operating in those silos, and we can start sharing that information amongst ourselves a little easier. With that goal in mind, in 2023, San Diego PD decided to go for cameras and license plate readers. To enable these solutions and connect them to their central system, the police department turned to Ubicquia’s Ubihubs. And in December of that year started deploying these multipurpose devices along with AXIS cameras and Flock Safety license plate readers. The authority purchased 500 Ubihubs with a dual camera and LPR on each. Ubicquia provided what they call the Ubihub, and that attaches to the top of the streetlight. It plugs into the LED light. And then that provides two situational cameras, one forward facing and covers basically your roadway, and then one that's, rear facing, which covers everything behind a light pole, kind of like your streets. Attached to the Ubihub is an ALPR camera, and that's through Flock (Safety). And so it's a partnership through Ubicquia and Flock to join these technologies together. Ubihub which is for all intents and purposes, it's a managed switch that sits on top of the streetlight. What that allows is for the license plate readers and the situational awareness cameras to tap into existing infrastructure, the streetlights are already, there to tap into reliable power. So you already have the continuous power there 24/7 power access at the streetlights, and it allows the management of the data coming back from the license plate readers as well as the situational awareness cameras. This isn't the first time San Diego deployed this type of technology. Back in 2016, they already deployed cameras with the same purpose, but had to shut down the program in 2020 due to privacy concerns from residents. To ease those concerns, the city policy was adapted and renewed to fit the current tech landscape with the Transparent and Responsible Use of Surveillance Technology or TRUST ordinance. With the surveillance ordinance, what was established was a Privacy Advisory Board and a system for all identified surveillance technology. We write up an impact report and use policy, and in those in the impact report, we document: how is this technology going to impact the community? What's the cost associated with it? What are we doing to protect this privacy? What are the security measures that are in place? Our use policy kind of covers more of that. When can we use it? When can we not use it? So we establish that we take it to the Privacy Advisory Board. We present it to them. Everything that we've looked at, the systems that we've put in place to protect privacy. They're granted 90 days to kind of review what we've brought. They look into the technology and they're looking at it from a point of like, maybe we've missed something. You know, maybe there's something we need to consider, and then they'll give us recommendations as to how we can tighten it up and make it a little bit safer for the public, or at least just alleviate some of those concerns that some people might have. If the cameras can see into a garden, for example, they blackout that part to only record public spaces. However, the privacy concern remains to this day. And with the fact that faces aren't blurred, residents worry about a Big Brother effect. In December of 2024, a lawsuit was filed against the project, claiming surveillance tech was deployed without consent at Comic-Con and the Pride Parade. This could once again hinder San Diego PD's efforts. But earlier that same year, Mayor Todd Gloria said results spoke for themselves. In the first ten months, the police department had recovered 219 stolen vehicles, with 174 people taken into custody for the theft. They'd used the tech during the investigation of 290 events, recovered ten guns thanks to it, and brought 206 people into custody, one of which was involved in two attempted kidnapings. One of their first cases even led them to find a missing person thanks to the technology. Lieutenant McAndrew assured me that the footage of the cameras wasn't being monitored in real time, and that the license plate readers weren't being used for traffic enforcement like speeding or incorrect parking, but rather that they were being used to gather and centralize data on situations like stolen vehicles, violent crimes like stabbings or shootings, or events like missing persons. When these take place, footage is retrieved from the Ubihub or the cloud, and reviewed or alerts are sent thanks to the LPRs. Regarding data, LPR data is stored for 30 days and the one gathered by the cameras for 13. We only pull the data when we have qualifying crimes. When I say qualifying crime, we're looking at violent crimes. We're looking at if there's a stabbing, a shooting, if there's fatal collisions. So whenever we have those, then, our team will go in there and we'll download that video. We only want those snippets of what's actually happening out there when an event occurs. Ubicquia provides a platform for managing the lighting controls, and that has become kind of a Swiss army knife for us to allow for management of multiple components that are deployed on our solution. Ubicquia does not own any of the data. We're more an aggregator and kind of manager of the data, but it always belongs to the city that we're working with. The police department has almost completed the deployment of the 500 devices, which were placed based on crime statistics. The initial installation and activation cost of the solution was $1.5 million, and then there's an annual cost of some $2 million for the equipment and maintenance. To Lieutenant McAndrew, the ROI comes in different ways. We’re able to identify a lot of suspect vehicles, people that are associated with crimes. We're able to pull that data, see it, identify vehicles and put it in there, our return on investment is we're able to close cases, we're able to do it a lot faster. We're able to identify these suspects a lot quicker, which is saving us time and saving our detectives time and saving our officers time. We're also able to do more of a precision enforcement, because once we've identified the vehicle, we don't have to stop similar vehicles. Since the system's been implemented, we've recovered an estimated just over $3 million in stolen property. This project had two points in its favor and will always have one against. The first in favor is that the city owns the streetlights. A lot of times utilities own the poles or the lighting fixtures or the whole infrastructure. This can hinder many smart city projects due to bureaucracy and availability. With the city owning the streetlights, the path to deployment is bound to be smoother for the city and its partners. There was a trend in cities giving the infrastructure to utilities, but now municipalities like Dallas are interested in buying back their streetlights from the utility. The other point is that the city learned from their mistakes and created the policy to back these kinds of solutions to avoid another failure in which projects are shut down because privacy concerns haven't been addressed. But privacy will always play against these projects, as it can sometimes be hard to find the balance between privacy and safety. So it will be key to have strong, transparent policies, protections against data breaches and accuracy.