BY JAMES RICKMAN
Los Alamos

Los Alamos Police Chief Dino Sgambellone would love for Los Alamos residents to believe that his department and the County are being fully transparent about the use of Automated License Plate Readers (ALPRs), but the chief’s presentation before the rubber-stamp Los Alamos County Council on June 30 provided little hope.

First and foremost, it was not until that meeting—just days before a nationwide celebration of 250 years of Liberty—that the chief decided to drop the bombshell that his department had been surveilling citizens with a network of ALPRs since 2023. It wasn’t until after numerous
concerned citizens had publicly questioned the use of ALPRs and raised associated privacy
concerns this year that Sgambellone decided the public might be interested that their community had become part of the burgeoning Surveillance Society. Without citizen inquiries, I strongly doubt the chief would have come clean about riding the ragged edges of a very gray area with respect to basic civil liberties.

The “transparent” chief also neglected to specifically mention how much the taxpayers of Los Alamos are being charged for the pleasure of becoming inescapably surveilled insects under a bell jar of nationwide surveillance. He also forgot to mention in detail how many ALPRs are constantly recording the coming and goings of every citizen using our public roads and streets, or the specific locations of his (presumably very expensive) surveillance gauntlet.

Coming out of the gates of the June 30 meeting with those strikes against him, the chief then got a little foxy, telling the Councilors and the public that the Police would be the ones watching the proverbial henhouse. With a straight face, he pointed to a department administered policy that would, to paraphrase, prevent abuse and protect the civil liberties of citizens. Maybe the chief isn’t familiar with the countless documented cases of abuses of ALPR data by law-enforcement personnel across the country. Maybe the chief has conveniently forgotten that within his own department we’ve heard over and over again through the years about abuses of power and betrayals of trust by officers wearing the LAPD uniform.

While many police officers walk the straight and narrow, the ones who don’t, and the others who help maintain the opacity of that famed and fabled “thin blue line” with their silence, cast
aspersions on the integrity of the entire law enforcement community. Pardon me for being so cynical as to doubt the effectiveness of cops policing their own vague policies and procedures, especially when playing fast and loose with ethics might net that career-enhancing bust every cop dreams of. The chief’s policy also specifically exempts inspection of ALPR use (and potential abuse) by nearly anyone outside of the chief, a couple of officers, and the courts. What could possibly go wrong?

One other note about that ALPR policy and the pledge of transparency related to all things
ALPR: Shortly before the June 30 meeting, the County’s Public Relations person responded to a letter I had written about ALPRs, stating that the County had a policy related to them; yet the
June 30 meeting’s agenda packet included only a policy dated the next day — July 1, 2026 — signed by the chief. Sorry to have to say it to the PR guy, but revisionist history is not
“transparency.”

I encourage everyone who disagrees with the utility and need for a Surveillance Society to come hear the chief and a honcho from Axon surveillance pretend to be transparent from 5 to 7 p.m. on Thursday, Aug. 27. After that, you can then tell the Los Alamos County Council how you feel about your tax dollars being used to surveil everyone who lives under the presumption of innocence at the regular Council meeting on Tuesday, Sept. 8.