Vallejo surveillance board forms ad hoc subcommittee, presses police on Raven data-sharing and vendor NDAs

The Vallejo Surveillance Advisory Board voted unanimously to create an ad hoc subcommittee to work with the Vallejo Police Department on a mobile security tower policy.

The vote came at the board’s meeting after members discussed using San Francisco’s mobile security tower policy as a template and several volunteered to serve on the subcommittee. Board members Stewart, Owen, Ross, Lee and Cohen Thompson recorded affirmative votes.

Board members also spent the meeting reviewing VPD’s monthly technology usage reports for drones, cell-site simulators, automatic license-plate readers (ALPR) and Flock Raven gunshot-detection units. The meeting included repeated requests for clearer data and legal guidance.

"I think it would provide a good service ... to offer a little bit of reasoning as to why we're voting on something," Board member Ross said, urging members to state rationale when placing items before the board so the public and City Council can understand the decision-making.

Board member Owen pressed the department on procurement practices, asking whether VPD signs nondisclosure agreements with equipment vendors. "When the Stingray devices were coming out originally, the manufacturer required all police forces to sign an NDA and not discuss them," Owen said, asking staff to report whether similar NDAs exist now.

VPD’s captain, responding to questions about Flock Raven alerts, said Raven 'hits' are fixed but how calls are categorized by dispatch affects whether those hits appear in a shots-fired report. The captain offered to have an analyst produce a merged list tying Raven alerts to confirmed shots-fired calls upon request. "If it's a shots-fired call and it has a correlation to a Raven hit, then, yes, I'd be able to easily provide that," the captain said.

On federal data sharing, the captain said the department "limit[s] our data sharing to the state of California." The deputy city attorney, Angad Gangapuram, agreed to research several open questions—including whether national security letters or FISA-related demands change that position—and provide a written report and the relevant laws and policies at the next meeting.

Board member Stewart asked for basic operational details to be added to future reports, such as how many Raven units the city has and whether budget requests are planned; the captain said the number was "somewhere in the realm of 100" and that the department is exploring funding for expansion.

The board also instructed staff to return with (1) a correlated Raven-to-shots-fired data table, (2) a written memo from the city attorney listing statutes, ordinances or policies that restrict sharing information with federal authorities (including any guidance on national security letters), and (3) a report identifying how many Raven and ALPR units are deployed in Vallejo.

The meeting ended with members adding the attorney’s data-sharing memo, the Raven inventory and discussion of meeting frequency to future agendas.