Saratoga residents add to city’s network of license plate readers to help fight crime

Cameras have ID'd stolen vehicles, burglary suspects.

In the affluent, family-oriented city of Saratoga, crime rates sit well below the regional average, yet residential burglaries have been a top concern for residents and officials.

A group of residents in Saratoga Woods, a neighborhood in the northeastern end of the city that sits above Highway 85, took matters into their own hands and invested in license plate reader cameras to deter criminals from entering their neighborhood in the first place.

These cameras, which help law enforcement identify stolen vehicles or cars associated with crimes, are already in Bay Area communities like Los Gatos, Fremont, Alameda, San Jose and Los Altos Hills.

Now, Saratoga neighborhoods are expanding the cameras’ coverage area by splitting the costs with their neighbors and sharing the data with local law enforcement.

In 2022, the city installed seven Flock cameras on major roadways as part of a two-year, $20,000 pilot program. Residents of surrounding neighborhoods are able to add their cameras’ data to Saratoga’s feed .

In the last year, Saratoga’s cameras helped to recover 16 stolen vehicles and six vehicles with stolen license plates, and helped identify five robbery and burglary suspects, data from the Santa Clara County Sheriff’s Office show. The cameras also located two missing people.

“I think they’re very successful, especially with the stolen vehicles; we’ve had 16 of them that we were notified of as soon as they came into town,” West Valley Patrol Division Commander Neil Valenzuela said. “Who knows what they would have been up to in town had we not made contact with them.”

Saratoga’s model

Longtime Saratoga resident Larry Schwerin said his Neighborhood Watch group was getting fed up with residential burglaries in Saratoga Woods in 2018.

The number of residential burglaries in Saratoga shot up in 2016, reaching 130 reported cases. While that number was nearly cut in half in 2017 with just 69 cases reported, 2018 trended upward again with 80 cases.

Schwerin, who grew up in Philadelphia, said the Neighborhood Watch group started by assigning patrol shifts on a volunteer basis, and then started researching technology like license plate reader cameras.

“It was just concerning. Now, coming from a city like Philadelphia, this is nothing, right? But to this community, it was alarming,” Schwerin said. “People were getting a little shook up.”

After talking with the CEO of Flock and to the Santa Clara County Sheriff’s Office, the group purchased five cameras to be placed in Saratoga Woods. Schwerin said they didn’t force neighbors to contribute but took voluntary payments of $100-$200.

“I think it definitely helped,” Schwerin said. “As a deterrent, or whatever you want to call it, the data went in the right direction.”

Saratoga Woods was among six neighborhoods that got city council approval June 7 to establish lighting and landscaping districts. Residents in these districts vote to pay additional fees for services that have been expanded to include Flock cameras.

Residents in Saratoga Woods, which has around 375 homes, will each pay $56.28 per year for seven Flock cameras. Holly Beilin, spokesperson for Flock, said annual fees for just one camera are $2,500 to $3,000.

Gardiner Park residents will pay $97.58 for three cameras to cover the neighborhood’s 109 homes, and the 46 homeowners in Lower Pierce will pay $133.58 annually for two cameras.

Residents of Golden Triangle’s 909 homes will each pay $93.50 for 10 cameras, and Burgundy Way’s 76 homeowners will pay $93.50 for two cameras. Austin-Bainter residents will each pay $145.95 for two cameras to cover the neighborhood’s 48 homes.

Violation of privacy?

While data show the cameras can help catch criminals, some residents are concerned about the cameras impact on privacy.

“It requires…trusting somebody else with eyes and ears into our neighborhoods. It, at least personally, makes me creeped out,” said a resident at a Saratoga City Council meeting.

“I think this is a scam,” said another.

Saratoga gets its cameras from Flock Safety, a company with cameras in more than 2,500 communities across the country. Beilin said there are several safeguards in place to preserve privacy while promoting safety.

“There’s no people in these images; there’s no ability to search by people,” Beilin said. “You can’t search for a woman or someone of a specific ethnicity. All you can search for is the plate, the color, the make and model of the car.”

The motion-activated cameras are programmed to only take still images of the back of a vehicle, and the software detects whether the plate is associated with an Amber Alert, or if the vehicle is stolen.

Saratoga’s camera network is managed by the Santa Clara County Sheriff’s Office, but Flock takes care of installation, software updates, maintenance and data storage.

“Law enforcement don’t have to deal with that,” Beilin said. “They can really just use the technology and fight crime, and we can handle everything else,” .

To track when law enforcement or city governments access data from the cameras, Flock requires users to input a reason for their search. That search log is publicly available through a transparency portal.

The company does not own the data it collects, which means it’s legally unable to sell or share it.

Other cities are also using Flock’s cameras. The Los Gatos-Monte Sereno Police Department has a voluntary video camera registry called “On Watch” that business owners, private residents and neighborhoods can register their camera with.

The department purchased 15 Flock cameras in June 2021, and homeowners associations and neighborhoods have purchased their own cameras.