The City of Santa Ana is considering asking our State Representatives to amend Assembly Bill 645 to allow the City of Santa Ana to establish a Speed Safety Pilot Program. We support prioritizing safe streets, without surveillance.

A Program would rely on automated camera and radar systems that capture images of vehicles and license plates to enforce speed violations. While this may offer one approach to addressing traffic safety, it also represents an expansion of surveillance technology that warrants careful consideration.

The City Council must proceed with caution and take additional steps to evaluate alternative, non-surveillance based traffic measures before providing direction to staff that would advance the establishment of a Speed Safety System Pilot Program.

When AB 645 was originally debated and passed in 2023, it faced significant opposition from civil rights and community organizations, including Human Rights Watch, Black Lives Matter California, and ACLU California Action. These groups raised concerns about privacy, data collection, potential misuse, and the disproportionate impact automated enforcement systems can have on low-income, and immigrant communities. There are also implementation concerns. Cities like San Francisco have experienced delays and challenges in rolling out speed camera programs, raising questions about feasibility, cost, and effectiveness.

In addition, data from other cities show troubling concerns. In Chicago, between 2015 and 2019, speed cameras ticketed households in majority Black and Latino ZIP codes at two times the rate of majority white zip codes. Similarly, in the District of Columbia, where photo enforcement accounts for 96 percent of citations and 97 percent of fines, drivers in Black-segregated areas were over seventeen times more likely to receive a moving violation than drivers in white-segregated areas. This reflects a clear trend amongst automated enforcement mechanisms, they are routinely found to disproportionately target and ticket drivers in Black, Indigenous, People of Color (BIPOC) neighborhoods.

This is especially important given the City’s recent adoption of Automatic License Plate Reader (ALPR) technology through Flock. As the City considers additional automated enforcement tools, it is essential to evaluate the full impact of these technologies and ensure they align with the City’s values and commitments to protecting our most vulnerable communities.

It is critical that the City take a more deliberate and community centered approach before providing direction that would advance the establishment of a Speed Safety Pilot Program. The Council must pause on advancing this resolution and instead prioritize research, transparency and community engagement.