 Good afternoon. Welcome to the panel on automatic speed enforcement. A very contentious issue in our community and hopefully this panel will help smooth over some of the edges so everyone can work together and we can get where we need to go. My name is Steve Bingham and I'm going to moderate but briefly I come to this work for a specific sad reason. My daughter was killed biking to work in Cleveland in 2009 and that tragic incident caused me to become a pretty much a full-time street safety activist. Ironically having been a legal aid lawyer for 23 years that's one of our offices right across the street. I was one of the very early people dealing with the issue of the inequity of traffic fines and people losing their driver's licenses and not being able to register their cars and I worked on that for 12 years before getting into this issue and so I feel I have one foot in each side of this issue which is we need to slow people down it's just just an epidemic of monstrous proportions and yet we need to do it in a way that it doesn't just lead to a lot of support people getting tickets and having their cars towed and not being able to ever drive again so we're gonna begin with Brian who is on the Oakland Privacy Commission and he's going to introduce himself and kind of set the frame for the discussion this afternoon. Thank you thank you guys for showing up today to weigh in on this very timely issue you know I assume most of you live in the East Bay if not in Oakland you know we've certainly seen a pretty big pretty big increase in fatalities involving automobiles and I'm sure as bicyclists I know when I ride my bike around I'm always like head on a swivel just not only from the potholes we've got around here but from you know vehicles it is dangerous to ride a bike around we've seen a number of horror stories and my friend supervisor Wilma Chan and Alameda you know some really really sad things happening in our society and so my job as as chair of the Privacy Commission in Oakland is you know we've got multiple parts multiple duties but primarily what we're supposed to do is serve as an advisory body to the Oakland City Council and to appropriately vet new and emerging technologies and sometimes our existing technologies that we've had for a number of years and try to thread the needle between getting the utility out of it the good stuff while mitigating potential harms the primary focus on on the harm side is certainly privacy which is kind of a vague undefined concept and certainly subjective in nature you know I might put everything on Facebook you don't put anything on Facebook and most people are somewhere in between the two extremes we try to look at what is being collected you know what is the purpose why did you collect this data in the first place how long are you gonna retain it our third party is getting access to it as we rely on new technologies it's almost certainly going to always involve a private party a private vendor the the sort of you know profit motivation makes a lot of people nervous that there might be some you know nefarious things happening in the shadows and so we try to do and I'll specifically reference Nicole you know oak dot would bring up a project to us she's brought or her department has brought like a license plate reader project to us before to help with parking enforcement and so we'll look at the vendor they're using you know who at who owns the data who gets access to it maybe how the appeal process works efficacy you know is it gonna even work and I know that's what we're gonna talk about a little bit today would automated speed enforcement change behavior in a positive manner that that's the goal and someone like me needs to ensure that there is an appropriate use policy with guardrails to mitigate against abuses that might impact negatively impact our civil liberties what I'll probably focus on a little bit more as sort of a subset of our duties when we look at things through an equitable lens we one of the standards in our vetting framework is that the benefits have to outweigh the cost and the cost is to our privacy to our civil liberties and also to the taxpayer and sort of implied within that sort of secondary concern is you know disparate impact would a bill like this if it's enacted which does come with you know citations with penalties is it maybe gonna only target you know black folks in East Oakland where a lot of the fatalities are happening and we're gonna I would assume put cameras there since we want to change that behavior is it going to you know really negatively impact lower income folks in a manner that's you know punitive that maybe they get trapped in a debt cycle with escalating fees and late fees and maybe you can't register your car and so we have to think about those consequences as well even though sort of our primary lens the driver is really you know the privacy impact as we move into you know the future and it's already here is we're not just looking at law enforcement we're looking at smart city applications you know we are already as coordinates some of it is ignorance we're not we're not turning off certain settings or controlling our apps in a way that the designer has created for us in response to these concerns and so these are the questions that we try to try to act we have an ordinance a law in Oakland which is very similar there's actually 22 across the country at the city county levels and unfortunately he just walked out I was gonna give kudos to a BART director Rayburn as the first transit district that's also gone this way they use a lot of technologies to monitor their platforms and trains and public safety concerns of course you know we've seen a number of quality of life problems you know on BART especially during the pandemic and just you know with unsheltered folks and just a lot of the problems that were seen and and what someone like Nicole would have to do is bring us an impact analysis you know here's the pros and cons here's what we hope will happen if we implement this maybe there's a track record of success or failures in other jurisdictions that we need to know about and some of that burden is necessarily going to follow on the privacy commission you know there's very few cities that have you know maybe a privacy lawyer or a data scientist expert on staff you know through no fault of their own it's just not customary you know that's a number of larger cities are trying to do like corporations have chief privacy officers and and and privacy offices staff to really help guide city practices and so we're kind of serving that function we carry some of that burden and then ideally we work like we've unanimously been approving so far everything Oak Dot is brought to us you know I give I'll give him a shout out when he gets back in as an entire jurisdiction we rate BART might not on profit secure justice I do this work all across the country we rate BART as the best jurisdiction in the country but Oak Dot as a department is our highest rated department in the country they do great work they've bought in you know when when they bring us documents you could tell they've already put thought into them they've already addressed a lot of the concerns even before they come to us it's been a real pleasure working with them on on the more sort of you know that the efficacy side you know some things I want to bring up you know upfront especially when it's brand new there is no track record right you just we're making educated guesses all of us are making educated guesses at this stage so my own philosophy as chair has been generally okay let's let's trust you know let's approve these things up front but that's why our model does have an annual reporting obligation it's very robust and the poll would have to come back to us in a year and say here's what the new data shows and that's just to help us constantly make better informed decisions maybe something doesn't work and we just wasted a bunch of taxpayer money so we want to discontinue it maybe our retention limit was too short the poll actually can't do our job because I'm forcing her to delete data so we need to amend our policy and change that that's the types of conversations we have and then we'll we're an advisory body only our real name is actually privacy advisory commission we would make recommendations to the council and then a council you know will ultimately make a decision and we're now going to hear from David Forza hopefully who's in Sacramento he's the he's been a consultant for the Transportation Committee of the Assembly for four years and is an expert on automated speed enforcement and is currently working for author Laura Friedman who you may all know is also the chair of the Transportation Committee and he has helped draft AB 2336 which is the next version after last year's AB 550 which for reasons that will be discussed here never never made it in the law so if it works can we go to David and David you can introduce yourself further if you like that can everybody hear me or yes you can hear me wonderful hello my name is David Spurs I really appreciate the introduction just on a technical point I do have a slideshow can someone make me the host so I can show the slideshow sorry everyone wonderful okay so I'm here today that can you guys see the slide wonderful okay yeah is it full screen now it's close enough all right so my name is David Spurs I as mentioned I am a consultant for the Assembly Transportation Committee I am also staffing this bill for Assembly member Laura Friedman and I want to kick it off more starting on why are we doing this but this is a crowd that I don't really need to explain this to NTSB estimates that speeding is a factor in 31% of all traffic fatalities between 2005 and 2014 killing over well over a hundred thousand people and 2020 alone in California over 3800 Californians lost their lives to traffic fatalities over a thousand of which were pedestrians and cyclists the speed that a car is going is a dramatic factor on whether or not a pedestrian is going to survive a car going 20 miles per hour has a 10% chance of killing a pedestrian versus a car going 40 miles per hour has an 80% chance of killing a pedestrian speed cameras have been in an effective manner on slowing cars down the NTSB did a systematic review of 14 studies looking at speed cameras across Canada Europe Australia New Zealand and found reductions in crashes from 5 to 69% injury reductions from 12 to 65% fatality reductions of 17 to 71% other research also shown a significant decrease in injuries that the picture you're looking at now is New York City's speed camera system that they've had set up for the last few years these cameras have shown dramatic effects on getting people to slow down and many intersections they've seen close to a 90% reduction and the people getting a speeding ticket from the beginning of the year to the end of the year. So that's the why here's the what my chair is introduced AB 2336 it authorizes speed cameras in six cities in California for five years including San Francisco San Jose Oakland Los Angeles Glendale and yet to be named Southern California City. The cameras are limited and where they can be placed to 15% of the streets of the highest injuries and fatalities within that jurisdiction school zones and streets of the high instance of speed racing and motor vehicle exposition of speed which the site shows this pilot is very limited New York City has 2000 cameras under this pilot program Los Angeles is going to have 125 systems a system is two cameras a piece one going each way and directions on the road San Jose San Francisco get 33 systems Oakland gets 18 Glendale is going to get nine the unnamed city is going to get nine systems. The fines in this bill going on the equity concerns that were raised earlier are significantly less than what the penalties would be today of a law enforcement officer pulled you over for speeding. This bill provides for a $50 ticket if you're going 11 to 15 miles per hour over the speed limit $100 from 16 to 25 26 miles per hour $200 and a speed greater than of than 100 miles per hour $500 for the ticket. As you can see this is significantly less than what a ticket would be if law enforcement pulled you over today. Unlike the tickets by law enforcement these are going to be civil violations they're not going to have criminal implications. So beyond these high fines and points that come on your driver's license this bill will not have points because it's a civil violation if you don't show up to court you're not going to get a failure to appear a violation that's a $300 civil assessment added on top of all these fines it can result in the driver's license suspension it can result in a misdemeanor none of these things are going to happen if we implement this bill and we use speed cameras to enforce the speed limits. These fines might be too high though for some individuals and so this bill tried to take equity into account. If you're on public benefits which we've defined as indigent you're going to get an 80% discount on the fines you're also going to be required to be offered a payment plan for the fines. If you can't pay the fines you can opt to do community service instead you're looking at $10 $20 $40 and $100 tickets. If you're 200% above the poverty level a family of four making $54,000 a year you're looking at a $25 ticket for going 11 to 15 miles an hour over the speed limit 50 and so on and so forth. So we try to design this bill with equity in mind and recognizing that fines and fees can be burdensome and we tried to find a way to reduce them for people that cannot afford them to try to nudge people into slowing down. So where does the money go? One of the big criticisms that comes with any of these programs is oh this isn't for safety this is for money and there's good reason for that criticism. You've seen cities make the mistake of authorizing changes to their speed camera systems in their budget. The city of Chicago more recently lowered the speed threshold from 10 miles per hour over the speed limit to 6 miles per hour over the speed limit to solve a budget shortfall. We don't want that to happen. We don't want cities to be looking at this as a way to raise money. We want cities to look at this as a way to increase safety. So this bill limits what can be used for that fine revenue to enhance safety for road users. The fines have to go to bicycle lanes, road diets, chicanes, chokers, curb extensions, medium islands, roundabouts, traffic circles, speed humps and tables, raised crosswalks, things that are going to have engineering solutions to slowing drivers down, not just giving them tickets. If the city doesn't pay for these things in a three year time period with the revenue that they're getting, then they lose that money. It's going to go to the state and go into the active transportation program so other cities can bid on projects to build the projects in their city instead. Cities are prohibited from using the fine revenue to backfill their existing expenditure on those items, using language from SB 1 when we gave cities more money when that passed. And finally, if the speed cameras are not reducing injuries, I'm sorry, are not reducing violations by 25% over an 18 month period, they're going to have to put up a speed feedback sign where the camera is operated and they're going to have to start planning to build any of these things on that street. If they want to continue operating the camera, and if the construction hasn't begun within two years, they're not allowed to keep the camera at that location. So who's supporting this bill? We have a large coalition, including the very cities that are part of the pilot, but we also have other cities that are supporting the bill, recognizing the importance of getting this kicked off in California that are not part of this pilot program and would like to be included. We have groups like Active San Gabriel Valley, the California Bicycle Coalition, thank you again for putting this on. Safe streets for all, streets are for everyone, spur. And we also have opposition to this bill, raising some of the concerns that are already raised around equity from the ACLU, privacy issues being raised by the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the ACLU, the teamsters that are concerned that this is going to result in and tickets for their drivers, as well as groups that frankly don't see a problem with speeding, unless it's excessive 50 miles an hour over the speed limit like safer streets LA. So I think it's important when looking at these, look at besides the equity provisions that are in this bill, what did we do to protect privacy? So we tried to keep these things in mind as this bill moves forward. You have to delete the photos and the videos that are created from these cameras within five days if there's no violation captured. To link this back to the transit program that the previous speaker alluded to, the state requirement for that is 15 days. So this is a shorter window. It requires the photos and video to be destroyed after 60 days of the final adjudication and 120 days for the administrative records and cities if they would like to or allow to have a shorter timetable and to delete them sooner. They're prohibited from using facial recognition software and using these cameras. In fact, these cameras are generally aimed at taking pictures not of the driver but of the license plate of the vehicle in order to protect the privacy of the individual which is also one of the reasons why this is a civil program versus a criminal. I also think it's important to remember who's dying on streets and roads. You can bring up the equity issues. Let's talk about them. In the city of Los Angeles, African-Americans make up 9% of the population but 16% of the traffic fatalities and 14% of the injuries. 43% of all victims that were killed looking at LA's traffic fatalities were African-American. I'm sorry, we're killed while walking. It's something that we absolutely need to address and I hope that we can continue to work with the opponents of this bill and get this important measure forward. So where is it now? The bill passed that of the Assembly Transportation Committee on an 11 to 0 vote with bipartisan support. There are four abstentions on the bill. On April 19th, the Assembly Privacy and Consumer Protections Committee chaired by Assembly Member Jesse Gabriel will be hearing the bill. If the bill passes out of that committee, next go to Appropriations Committee. The last date for Appropriations Committee to report bills to the floor is May 20th. We then have until May 27th to get it off the assembly floor and then the process starts all over again in the Senate. It will likely be double referred in the Senate to Transportation and Judiciary Committee, in which case as until July to get out of those two committees, August 12th to get out of their Appropriations Committee. It has to be to the governor's desk by the 31st and to and get a signature by the 30th. But I'm focused mostly on that April 19th date right now. So how can you help for those of you that are interested in supporting this bill? Reach out to me. Here's my email address and our office phone number. I'm happy to have a conversation. If you have concerns about the bill, I'm happy to have a conversation as well to try to talk about it. And I can help walk you through the process and sending support letters to the bill, as well as contacting your assembly members and senators on getting them to support the bill. And also you can contact Mark Wolkiewicz, who might be in the room with you guys today with Street Sprawl. He's helping put together a coalition letter of safety groups that are supporting the bill. I'm looking forward to questions later. Great. Thank you so much, David. That was very informative to set the stage. And now we're going to hear from Nicole, who works with Oakland Department of Transportation. And has been interested in this issue for a number of years. I first knew her once you worked at Walk SF. And I'll let you introduce yourself and tell it like it is or not. Thank you, Stephen. I'm going to walk over to the computer because I have a power point. Is it okay? I can advance my slides myself. That's okay, Dave. Thank you. Hi, everyone. I'm Nicole Ferrara. I'm our policy and intergovernmental affairs advisor at the City of Oakland Department of Transportation. Lovely to see lots of familiar faces and new ones. I'm excited to be here today to talk about Safe Oakland and the Speed Safety System legislation that David very clearly and thoroughly outlined. So I might skip over some of my slides. So as I get started, I want to just prepare you all that this is a presentation about death and it's uncomfortable. So content warning that this may be uncomfortable. I'm going to give you a little context on what is happening on Oakland streets. In 2021, 29 people were killed due to traffic violence on our streets. And every week, two people are either severely injured or killed on Oakland streets. So I think there's probably about 40 people in this room right now if you want to just picture all of that. Unfortunately, these crashes do not impact our communities equally. Seniors are two times more likely to be killed in a crash than the average Oaklander. And Black Oaklanders are three times more likely to be killed or severely injured while walking compared to the average Oaklander. And behind these statistics are real people with families, like DeAndre Bush, who was killed while riding his bicycle around the block from his house on 35th Ave. And his sister, Sherry, who remains every day thinking about that loss of life. Or Maisha Singleton, a mother of seven who was killed while crossing the street on 98th Ave while her kid sat in the car across the street waiting for her. Sorry. I think I needed the content warning. So we must do better. Our Safe Oakland Streets initiative has three goals. We will prevent serious and fatal injuries from happening on our streets. We are working to eliminate the inequities that exist in these traffic crashes. And three, we need to be conscious and intentional about any new equity issues that arise as a result. So I think that is really where I want to spend some time talking today. Through our SOS work, we analyzed about 70 different traffic safety initiatives. And we wanted to understand in our collaborative between the DOT and the Department of Race and Equity and the police department and our city administrator's office how we could advance the most effective strategies that are really going to make a difference in survivability of a crash and think about what are the potential equity impacts. And whether or not it's worth it, whether we can mitigate those equity impacts or whether those equity impacts are just too large to make it worth it. Where we landed, and this is a very simple outline of about 70 different literature reviews, is that engineering is by and large the most effective and critical strategy. And that policies related to speed and specifically automated speed enforcement is also highly effective. I think most importantly when we look at these strategies combined, they start to have additive effects. So when you're not just doing one strategy in isolation where you're combining things, you can really start to make a difference. So today I'll talk mostly about those policy and enforcement strategies, but I would be remiss to share that we are working incredibly hard to make engineering improvements day in and day out using as much of our taxpayer dollars as we can get based on hiring more and more engineers, getting more engineers in our budget to deliver these projects. We're delivering projects with quick and effective improvements in a matter of weeks. We're delivering these projects with concrete, with our own crews, with external crews. We're putting in speed humps on arterials in a fashion that has never been seen in on streets in the Bay Area and trying things out like these left turn traffic calming improvements over on Foothill on our high injury corridors. We're building cycle tracks and bike paths like this one on MacArthur Boulevard in East Oakland. We're putting in huge bullbouts that cut crossing distances by 60 percent enhanced yielding and maybe the first of its kind painted protected intersections. But at the end of the day these people are still dying on our streets and there's only so much that we can do to deliver these projects as quickly as we can to touch each of our streets as quickly as we can. And as you heard from David earlier, we know that speed has exponential impacts that at 40 miles per hour, nine out of 10 pedestrians are killed, but when we are able to cut things down to 20 miles an hour, nine out of 10 pedestrians survive. And in Oakland that's important because one out of four Oaklanders are involved, are killed in a crash where speeding is the primary factor. As David shared, we have speed safety systems are incredibly effective. I'll just highlight the right side where you see the overall decrease in fatalities of 55 percent in New York City, 39 percent in Maryland, 70 percent in Washington D.C. that's outstanding results. I want to shift focus a bit to what this means for reimagining public safety and get into a more detailed discussion around equity and how this is different. Right here you see our recommendation number 59 from City of Oakland's Reimagining Public Safety Task Force that charges us with moving most traffic enforcement out of the Oakland Police Department and into the Oakland Department of Transportation. And we really see automated speed enforcement as the way to do that. So I'll give a quick comparison of various speed enforcement strategies. In terms of officer enforced, according to our analysis and our literature review it has limited efficacy in terms of changing behavior. Speed safety systems has high efficacy. We know that there are implicit biases that can lead to more tickets for BIPOC drivers. We see that in our own data that more black and brown people are sighted than exist in Oakland, then are involved in crashes in Oakland at very high rates. Whereas speed safety systems again are taking a picture of the rear bumper of that vehicle. They're not even capturing a person's face so there's an opportunity for racial profiling. But I think we do have an important conversation around where these cameras are placed and I'll get to that in a moment. We have high with impacts on insurance rates whereas on speed safety systems you have a low fine of $50, $0 if you're going 1 to 10 miles over the speed limit, $50 if you're going 11 to 15 with fine reduction options that David outlined. Officer enforced are obviously police department led tickets. The legislation in front of you would require that the speed safety systems operate out of a department of transportation. Then finally I think we all know that interactions with law enforcement are stressful and we see over and over again instances of these interactions escalating and resulting in life and death situations. I think that is probably one of the more compelling reasons to use automated speed enforcement where we completely get to eliminate those interactions. I think I want to just highlight the no enforcement strategy where there's no efficacy obviously and you're not doing anything so there's no change happening. I will say I've been there as an advocate in the land of let's just do engineering, let's not even focus on enforcement but the more I see what's happening on our streets and I think there's unfortunately people are still dying despite the engineering improvements. You visit some of our brand new amazing corridors where we have millions invested and you still see people speeding and going around queues of cars just to get to where they want to go and that's the exact behavior that took the life of Myisha Singleton frankly and if we can save lives I think it's worth it. I think yeah just I know you know talking to residents in our highest priority neighborhoods we see the stress that they deal with. I've you know had the pleasure of working with Steve and others and families for safe streets and just hearing about the loss of life and the impact that that has is it's just it's really it's really painful to even watch let alone experience. I think there are really strong equity mitigations within this bill. We have you know there are non-moving violations without and we offer sorry a diversion program ticket fee reductions between that 50 and 80 percent. We're working with stakeholders to develop that system use policy which includes location selection so I think okay I'm gonna try this one. I think that's where the work comes in of really engaging our highest priority communities engaging our citywide advocates in understanding what are the parameters we should be using. Where should cameras be located? Taking into account individual city constraints like for those of you who are familiar with San Francisco a camera in the tenderloin where most people don't drive where you have a lot of commute traffic coming through it is very different from a camera in East Oakland where a lot of people are car dependent and where you do have a lot of East Oaklanders driving so I think being really careful about where we're placing cameras are these maybe locations of regional significance where you have a lot of cut through traffic or etc is an important consideration and all of that work really does need to happen at that city level and that's part of the process that's required in the law. Lastly there's a lot of flexibility and warnings written in to this to this bill so one to ten miles per hour you don't even get a ticket. We are signs are required to alert drivers that a camera is in place so your the goal here is not a gotcha it's please slow down because people are dying. There's a 30-day warning period when a new camera is put in place to give people that opportunity to get used to the camera before before getting penalized. So there's a lot of work that happens before installation I'm not going to go through this but this outlines all the work that goes on before installation and location selection and then after installation and frankly like all of the the evaluation that happens and the you know we have to actually remove the the camera if it's not effective after 18 months so I think there's been a lot of really amazing thought put into put into this bill. So with that I'm going to stop talking and pass it back to Steven thank you. Thank you Nick Cole and now we're going to hear from Kevin Chen from Los Angeles he's the deputy director of the bike coalition down there and see what this whole discussion looks like down south. Thanks Steven thank you so much so LA is going to have the opportunity to put these cameras to the test between LA and Glendale we have over 130 cameras to potentially deploy if if this legislation passes and in existing conversations with folks in LA there've been a number of concerns which you know seeing Nicole's presentation it's as the model for many of the equity concerns it's nice to see that a lot of things have already been thought through and a lot of things are being addressed in a meaningful way. I think there's you know there's still some certain concerns that that the community still feels that that they you know that many community members really are not sure about just yet so one for instance you know we're certainly asking community members to balance concerns about law enforcement many of the black and brown communities in LA are disproportionately impacted by by their interactions with law enforcement but we're asking them to benefit to balance those concerns about law enforcement against privacy and then also being able to afford fines so the the reduced penalties are great and it's a it's a step in the right direction but many of the low income communities that we you know that that we have had conversations with for them even a $10 fine is a real struggle and asking those same community members to find time to do community service is a challenge so it's still it is important to have the reduced fines and enforcement is certainly an important aspect but it's something that I think a lot of folks would a lot of folks that we we've worked with would still like to see you know other opportunities or other ways in which folks can engage you know and and if they're penalized we you know figure out a way to actually compensate for that the also also the process is important so I've had the opportunity to live in Washington DC where we saw there was a tremendous amount of effectiveness on reducing the number of fatalities however even in a system like DC's there've been a number of problems with it oftentimes when tickets are issued fine you know the the ticket that's issued doesn't actually get mailed to the right place or the ticket gets lost or something happens along the way and that actually results in compounded fines if the ticket isn't paid so there are you know process issues are going to be really important and how we in LA and Glendale will deploy that and how that's going to actually be how that will actually be implemented is going to be really key to making sure that all of these all of these processes for reduced fines and all of these processes for diversion programs we want to make sure that that's as as low impact and it's easy for people to apply for as possible and we need to make sure that that people actually getting you know if they do get a ticket that they do have they do actually receive it and then see the last thing I just want to make sure to mention is you know as as Nicole mentioned engineering has been shown to be the key and one of the most effective ways and the fact that you know we are thrilled to see that the that in this legislation the way that the legislation is worded it allows for that money to be spent and focused on engineering and we want to make sure that it's given to those communities it's deployed that engineering is deployed in a meaningful way in those communities where the fines are being generated but also it's important to make sure that as we're thinking about where those cameras get placed one of the problems that we frequently see in LA is you know wealthier communities have the opportunity to really push against push back against deployments of these types of enforcement measures and so we really want to make sure that we're not disproportionately deploying these cameras only in communities of color where yes we are seeing a proportionate impact to those communities but at the same time we want to make sure that if communities of color are being disproportionately impacted but they're not the only ones being impacted that these cameras get deployed in places where they are needed you know we've seen a lot of talk about use of the high injury networks to determine placement of those cameras and also we want to make sure that there are measures in place that prevent you know communities that are wealthier from being able to essentially get those prevent cameras from being deployed in their communities I know when the original bill 550 was was written that was one of the concerns that we had was you know talking to folks about deploying the cameras around school zones and what that would necessarily mean for wealthier communities versus less wealthy communities so you know we're excited for the opportunity to be one of the pilot cities for this legislation if it is passed and we see this as a way for us to you know explore some of these challenges and make sure that if we're going to move forward with a more automated enforcement you know automated enforcement setup that we do it in the right way and that we have the opportunity to really work closely with the communities to make sure that the most impacted communities are impacted in a positive way that we're not actually creating new burdens for those communities and also making sure that those communities see the most benefits out of the funds that are generated by this legislation thank you Kevin and now before all the benefits of this bill and actually remarkable progress since the concept was first put forward in terms of addressing equity concerns both around and privacy concerns but we're not there yet there's still problems and so I'm going to turn it back to Kevin that kind of close this session just in terms of to Brian to close the session in terms of privacy issues particularly but also other equity issues and then we're going to open it to the floor for questions and also ideas that you may have I have several how we can get there so that these two courses can come together for a desperately needed technology so Brian thank you and I'm just going to start off with a couple of house clean items with director Ray Burn walked out of the room earlier but as publicly congratulating Bart my non-profit Secure Justice is highest rated jurisdiction in the country two years in a row compliant with your own surveillance ordinance obligation so I hope you guys are all part of customers as well tonight our privacy commission happens to be meeting at 5 p.m. virtually and although we will not be voting it's just going to be a little informational chat the lobbyist for the opposition of the state bill is going to share some of his concerns with us Nicole may you know participate or may just observe but she's going to bring the actual proposal to us May 5 so on May 5 if you want to show up the agenda should be on the city's website or you could just email me if you want it and I'll give it to you Brian with an eye brian.hofer at gmail.com and I'll just send it to you and you can access it by soon if you want to weigh in most of you probably are up to speed but just in case some aren't this has been a two-year effort and so a lot of what we just heard and I was privately whispering to Nicole I actually just learned some new things that I was unaware of that hadn't been addressed in last year's version and so it is correct as Kevin and others have just said that a lot of mitigation effort has happened in that two-year time period when Nicole comes to us in earnest in May part of our framework which is actually pretty unique to Oakland we we require the contract as well not just the use policy when we're involving private vendors we want to see who owns the data if my memory is correct I think Oak Dot is the only department in the country I've never had the fight over ownership of data they just knew right away like you know it's going to be Oakland's data I mean yes the private party is going to have to you know interact with it and access it to function for the technology to function but they can't you know go monetize it and sell it out to third parties and so that's one critical piece we're going to still look at the location choice is going to be probably pretty big in Oakland and that's you know that's always an interesting part for me intellectually because you know it's like when I talk to police specifically they're like well we go here because that's where the crime is like yeah but you're always going to that block and it's always black people and yet if your data is showing you that you know 90% of these accidents are happen you know fatal accidents are happening at this one intersection it's like it is reasonable that we have to go to that location and address it and there may be a tension there and that's what the Privacy Commission needs to do is try to address that for real and and create either a guardrail or some sort of mitigative step to lessen the impact right up front we also have to just be mindful this is new as I stated earlier to me I generally will probably vote yes on anything the first time we see it and be a little bit more critical during the annual review period once we actually have our own Oakland track record to examine is it working when Nicole shared earlier that their own data is showing BPAP people getting most of the citations I've looked at racial stop data for both Berkeley and Oakland it's horrible it's nowhere even close to matching the demographics in those respective cities so there is clearly and a lot of that racial stop data I should be more clear a lot of that was collected via license plates it is clear that technology you know it doesn't live in a vacuum the tech itself may be race-neutral but the humans are still involved with it right if we're going to select the camera choice that is a human decision not the camera decision and so those are the questions we're going to be asking in earnest in May when this comes forward and I imagine they're also you know weighing in at the state committee level and I just do want to encourage you folks all these mitigating steps are happening because people spoke because people did engage the office office they did write opposition letters they do talk to their elected officials and so we're making it better work product you know so I want to encourage you to get engaged if you're not already you know you may not love the final idea but it will be less bad you know that's that's the minimum and you might actually end up supporting it and we get to realize the benefits of it and and that's going to be an exciting thing if it works out as we hope. Thank you Mike so we'll open it up and I'm actually going to open up with one question challenge and hopefully there will be some other questions like this I haven't worked on these fine fees equity issues for 10 or 12 years the thing that just struck me has to go in the bill and I did actually talk to David force about it I don't know if he's still listening but if you don't pay your fine they notify DMV and DMV won't let you register your car this is a huge issue all over the state and as I think that was maybe Kevin pointed out mail delivery problems for people who are poor pretty awful and it's very common for people not to get their mail so that's one issue that's out there that needs somehow to be addressed but and maybe someone has an answer to that but I do if you guys can still hear me the floor to ask questions or make comments and I think David is going to I'll moderate and we're going to start we'll take your questions verbally here you can raise your hand but we have a question through the app so just to encourage you to use the app over the next day or so the question is and I'm going to reword the question just a little bit but like what do we know about people who are speeding in say Oakland in LA what do we expect the data to show us if the cameras are deployed geographically or equitably based on the high injury network what do we know now about those people is the question that we have online I would say you know I was involved tangentially in an analysis this is not typically analyzed but I was involved when I was at walk SF did analyze who's speeding and who's kind of at the wheel largely it's males I man this is going back in my brain but I think it was largely white males and I think from honestly I think it was from wealthier parts of the Bay area from the South Bay from Marin from the west side of San Francisco but I again I'm not really authorized to talk about that data because I was really tangentially involved the in Oakland we know who's involved we looked at who's involved in crashes and we compared that to who's getting citations and that could be someone involved behind the wheel or as a victim and we saw that still black people were disproportionately impacted by tickets about 33% of black Oaklanders are involved in a crash about 44% are receiving tickets are sorry about they receive about black Oaklanders 44% of black Oaklanders receive tickets but about 23% of Oaklanders are black so kind of see those escalating impacts so about two times the population are receiving tickets right now from traditional enforcement methods. So I don't have the numbers for LA readily available but what I will say is I would be surprised if they were that dramatically different from the numbers that Nicole just shared but one thing I do want to point out is that especially for LA and LA County one of the biggest challenges that we have of actually collecting that data is it's it's actually self reported by the police officer who makes the who makes the stop and so for that data oftentimes it is not 100% precise and it's not 100% accurate and it really there's you know there's a whole gamut of possibilities for how that data can be skewed or misconstrued or otherwise misrepresent the individual who's being stopped and so I think you know as important as that data is we do need to be careful about you know how how disaggregated how disaggregated that data is and how we actually do the collection of that data in a meaningful way but you know if we're looking at locales where police are deployed again the general tendency is for them to be deployed in black and brown communities and most many of the stops are taking place in black and brown communities and in LA in particular we see a lot of the generation of tickets coming out of those black and brown communities as well so as important as that as important it is to know who is speeding what we're you know I think what we're what we would love to be able to see is focus on why people are speeding and what is actually causing people to speed you know we see we see it a lot you know I live in the city of Long Beach we see it a lot for people who are driving from Orange County through Long Beach to get to jobs in the city of LA and there are certain thoroughfares that have particularly high impact on POC communities but also they are basically could have a potential positive impact and what the potential pitfalls might be in order to make sure that we're not again disproportionately negatively impacting the communities that live in those areas all right thanks we'll take your questions now I'll call on you go ahead and state your question I'll ask the panelists to repeat the question just to make sure everyone hears it before you give your answer Warren I'll start with you over there like I just explained the panelists are going to repeat the question so you can hear it okay Warren hold your hold your second question let's start with that one sure so the question is the speed at which the tickets can be issued is it is it 11 miles over the postage speed limit or the 11 miles over the 85th percentile and so from my personal experience in Washington DC it's over the postage speed limit and not based on the 85th percentile and so I don't know what it would necessarily be in Oakland yeah you would need to do a speed survey using the 85th percentile and taking the appropriate reductions from the 85th percentile to post the speed limit so it's both it's both in yeah okay thanks and I'm going to change my mind in mid-sentence since Warren asked a long question but a good one I'm just gonna hand the mic to y'all this is a question for David has there been any modeling or estimate about how much money would be collected and devoted towards street safety improvements in the various municipalities thanks there is not I think actually good can you guys hear me if you could speak up that would be great I'll I'll try to speak up there has not been a modeling no the I mean it's been there's been a lot of tickets issued in New York City but actually going back to the previous example New York City has a 25 miles per hour speed limit across the entire city whereas California does still base its speed limit on the 85th percentile with some deviations allowed and so I don't imagine you would see the same number of ticketing in California as you would in New York City and New York City has 2000 cameras the most any city will have is Los Angeles with 125 cameras and they get more cameras because they see more death there's a they saw 269 fatalities last year compared to Oakland's 40 no okay that works now great thanks um so I'm you know I remember hearing back when it was just like a San Jose San Francisco pilot years ago four or five years ago it's really evolved a lot in terms of especially the equity components I really appreciate that um I mean I think that it's really important to distinguish between kind of this like super misanthropic like driving 30 miles an hour over the speed limit and then just roads where people are constantly going 10 miles an hour over the speed limit and we know that speed kills right that like and so a road where everyone is going 10 miles an hour over the twisted speed limit may actually be a more dangerous road in a road where every once in a while someone's going 35 miles an hour over the speed limit we don't know I think is the answer and one question I have is you know there are all these uh restrictions on how long you keep the data for privacy considerations and wondering if there's a logging in this system that can be kept over time not the license plate readers but of car of how fast cars are going generally it can be looked at over time because if consistently a roadway is having users going 10 miles an hour over the speed limit those users aren't being ticketed personally I'm okay with that but those are the roadways where we really need infrastructural changes and so I'm wondering whether that's built into the bill whether it's something that can be done with the technology I don't even know I'm wondering if you can address that if someone I don't know who would address that best I I think that would involve a lot more monitoring that some of the privacy groups would be comfortable with if you're repeatedly capturing the speeds that everyone's going if they're not kept having a violation captured but I don't want to speak for the privacy groups but I imagine that would be a concern raised with having that type of monitoring and there's other technologies that could do that that don't have the video evidence feed uh speed feedback loops can capture the speeds that cars are going I'll I'll take a stab at this a little bit um and I don't know specifically that it's going to come up in Oakland but so my nonprofit Secure Justice we haven't taken a position on this bill and I doubt we will at all we'll probably just sit out but in Oakland and specifically with Oak Dot on other proposals that they brought before us I'm this very weird hybrid of super aggressive privacy activists and also guy that wants to rely on data and see what the real layer of the land is and so what we've done which some privacy groups don't agree with we have actually collected certain data like I believe you're suggesting and what we've drawn a line in a couple different places but the the short answer is if it's in the aggregate and we could just sort of look without any PII personally identify an information but try to get the answer that you're talking about I've always been comfortable with that and so you know I I kind of agree with David like that's a big bite to take off at this maybe kind of late stage since the bill's already drawing in but that probably is something we'd look at at the local level in Oakland. Hi I just want to speak to the disparate practice of ticketing in primarily black and brown communities as opposed to white communities so my community in Santa Fe which also borders the Bushrod neighborhood in North Oakland between it's first of all is the widest street in district one it's six lanes three in either direction with the median in between my neighborhood has changed dramatically in terms of demographics I call the police constantly about speeding so there is nine blocks between 55th street and the Berkeley border and people are going I mean it's like the ND 500 we never get anybody never get opd to come out and do ticketing we can't even cross our street there's a senior citizen building a center across the street seniors can't get over there and we can't get any enforcement at all I mean we could probably fund the entire Oakland police department if they gave tickets over there I mean it's really that bad so what can we do about that Nicole sorry to put you on the spot well that might be a good location for a speed camera if we can pass this legislation so might be a good opportunity for you to weigh in and I see Mark where's Mark there Mark's right there and Mark is with streets for all right yes okay and collecting signatures from folks and sign-ons for a letter that he's been working to develop from advocates so I would encourage you to talk with Mark and talk with me some more happy to connect you as well to various state state assembly members can I just add one word and just for us to continually think about itself so an example of how it's important to think infrastructure at the same time that we think speed cameras the work that I've done the people who are fines fees activists constantly say why don't you do traffic calming and all that and we are doing that but we need to do more of that and a street that has six lanes probably shouldn't exist you get rid of two lanes on each side and make bike lanes protected bike lanes I should mention that planning project is underway charlie over there is probably working on it so it seems to me that in terms of location of cameras for example and whatever the potential inequities of the data that might come out of it right because if we put the cameras in certain places then that's what it's going to be measuring right so it seems to me that there's going to be plenty of parallel situations between you say well here's a high injury location we're going to put a camera there let's find another place in the city that's engineered in a similar way so at least has some kind of a balance there so we're comparing two things that are somewhat like and then the other thing I would think is that potentially part of what's just what's upsetting the measurements to some degree is that there may be neighborhoods in which there's a lot more people who are necessarily pedestrians right and that that there's it might be a lot of high high vehicle high speed vehicle movement in places where there's just fewer people on the street and therefore they're not getting as many is that right am I completely off track there because I think that it's really important to get this right around what are we looking at when we look at the data right and so maybe somebody could speak to that who's better informed than I am I'll take a stab at it I think ultimately we're looking at where are we where can we put this to reduce the number of people dying and being severely injured there might be streets where people are speeding but people aren't dying and I think we need to put it where people are dying because we have 18 opportunities in the city of Oakland and so but that is all part of that use policy so I just want to add to that that you know your your point is well taken but one of the challenges that often comes from looking at the parallels of engineering is that you're going to find generally speaking the the worst streets tend to be in those poor neighborhoods to begin with and so finding a parallel street in a less you know less poor neighborhood or a wealthier neighborhood may be actually be a challenge to find something that that accurately represents a comparison point so I know you know in the city of LA we oftentimes have that challenge where um and and you know part of it is is also there's been this history of redlining that has happened that makes it so that many of those streets are engineered specifically through uh black and brown neighborhoods uh and and therefore you know trying to find that parallel in a non-black and brown neighborhood may be a challenge so it's something it's an interesting thought and and I appreciate you bringing it up and yeah I think it would be something to look at as we you know especially as LA gets the opportunity to implement it um maybe it's not something that we can look to encourage our department of transportation to look into. I'll just quickly add and I can't speak to the state bill on this part but in Oakland and anyone operating under the same surveillance vetting framework that question is going to be answered both during the up front stage and the impact analysis in the annual report uh we get the benefit with an impact analysis up front of getting a baseline of data the apples to apples comparison is is critical it's often very difficult to achieve um but hopefully then on the back end when that annual report comes to you we're going to ask all those questions and we're going to check those variables you know it's a personal source of frustration for me uh I just co-wrote uh Alameda's license plate reader policy yesterday it's a wonderful policy and I also told them it's completely useless they have no ability to gauge whether or not the technology is useful in actually achieving its stated goal they have no baseline of data so when next year shows they recovered 30 stolen vehicles it's meaningless because they don't know what they did the year before and so those are the we do solve those issues in Oakland under this framework we're going to ask Nicole what are your statistics today and then when she comes back next year and we do account you know I've got data scientists and folks on my own team that we look through these things um separately from the privacy commission okay control for variables also some years there's more crime other years less crime and you know you need to account for that and we do and we'll we'll be looking at that in earnest in Oakland this question is about the requirement to spend the collected money at the location of the camera it seems to me like that could burden what's already going to be a tough conversation like not only are you guys going to get a camera but we're also going to be back in a few years to take all your parking away here and rip the street up also it could mean that overly restrictive elements like that rule to make it hard for cities like Oakland to effectively spend that money so maybe this is a question for data can you talk more about that rule and about any accommodations that you're making for cities to flexibly use that money and make sure that we can actually spend it yeah so first that rule only kicks in if the camera is failing to decrease speeding by 25 percent so the they don't have to spend at that location if the camera has not um if the camera has successfully gotten 25 percent reductions in speeding i showed you data from new york city they had intersections where there's a 90 reduction and the number of tickets issued that trigger is supposed to come in to show that they put the camera in a location that the camera is not being effective it's not slowing down we're not achieving the results we want to achieve and you're gonna have to do some engineering work if you want to achieve the results you want to achieve because the camera is not by itself it's not doing it can i just interact real quick david and i apologize i'm not up to speed on this year's uh draft does engineering get to include alternatives subsidizing public transit protected bike lanes getting people out of cars in the first place bike lanes are included yeah hi uh up in eugenore again where my son lives uh two main streets six and seventh avenue east and west they instantly reduce the speed to 20 mile per hour per hour and the kicker there is they're both one-way streets going each way they synchronize the traffic lights no cameras no enforcement absolutely successful in bringing the speed down when i was in france last going from a rural 90 k an hour to 40 into a village there's a light up there if you're approaching it much over that 40 k turns right no one for needed no cameras and quite successful in getting the speed down so maybe these are things that could be looked at in the future when you generate some money from from this bill to try to reduce speed that way because he's gonna be very effective yeah i don't think i've gone to france almost every year to visit my wife's family i can sort of second that in terms of france and it is important to look at what other countries are doing seven or eight years ago france decided that the speed limit was the speed limit and i got two tickets driving that summer going one kilometer over the speed limit and obviously i was furious but you know what they have reduced crashes very very dramatically by that so one of the things that's a side issue but we have to look at is this concept that you can just speed over the speed limit and speed limit doesn't mean speed limit because if you don't have a bright line then if it's 10 to 11 versus 11 to 15 or whatever people are pushing it i do but i suspect almost everyone in the room who drives goes over the speed limit and it's i mean they certainly use enforcement but and they use speed cameras to do it but boy did they let the french know for a year ahead of time that it was coming so one of the important parts of this bill is that it does notify communities about the bill the speed cameras coming in where they're going to come in so that element as cities bring this online is a critical element in terms of getting buy-in from the community all right i have final question a tough bit of a question uh i think it's going to be for Nicole because i think Brian you might also want to weigh in on this uh as Nicole stated infrastructure and this is online encouraging how to use your app as Nicole stated infrastructure can't solve everything but oakland has only just reached the tip of the iceberg of what could be accomplished with infrastructure given oak dot's resource constraints would a speed camera enforcement program be more effective at improving safety compared to applying those same oak dot staff resources i think it's a both hand i i think there's so many benefits of infrastructure improvements beyond um traffic safety around health and livability and um neighborhood vibrancy that we we certainly wouldn't want to pull any of that back climate sustainability etc and in order to reach those goals we also need to make our streets safe enough so that people feel comfortable using them brian so let's say a year from now you're reviewing the program and oak dot is saying things like yeah we haven't gotten the speeds down enough but we don't have enough resources to get in there and fix the streets just yet would your perspective be to give them more time or if there is an equity issue to give them more time to work that out would you come in you know one year i mean i guess it depends on the degree of success they could show you know if it's a one percent reduction and we've got to wait five more years to re-engineer our roads probably not going to be that you know excited about continuing the project if 25 is the threshold and they're at 23 percent that's pretty good um we would probably say okay let's let's go another year and and and see if we get there i think that's it steve well thank you all for coming and thank you panelists