Services, Immigrant Rights & Education Network et al. v. Paul Joseph et al.

The original and still operative verified complaint was filed in November 2025. It alleges three causes of action: (1) violation of article 1, section 13 of the California Constitution; (2) violation of article 1, section 1 of the California Constitution; and (3) a taxpayer action under Code of Civil Procedure section 526a. There are no exhibits attached to the complaint.

At issue is Defendants’ demurrer to the complaint, opposed by Plaintiffs. The court will sustain the demurrer without leave to amend because it is bound by the appellate court’s decision in People v. Cartwright (2024) 99 Cal.App.5th 98, 105 (Cartwright).)

REQUEST FOR JUDICIAL NOTICE

“Judicial notice may not be taken of any matter unless authorized or required by law.” (Evid. Code, § 450.) A precondition to judicial notice in either its permissive or mandatory form is that the matter to be noticed be relevant to the material issue before the court. (Silverado Modjeska Recreation and Park Dist. v. County of Orange (2011) 197 Cal.App.4th 282, 307.) Evidence Code section 453, subdivision (b), requires a party seeking notice to “[furnish] the court with sufficient information to enable it to take judicial notice of the matter.”

Defendants have submitted a request for judicial notice of five purported facts in support of their demurrer. The facts relate to: (1) modes of transit in San Jose; (2) the prevalence of camera use to record vehicles; (3) the total mileage of streets in San Jose; (4) the number of traffic signals in San Jose; and (5) the number of stop-signed intersections. Defendants assert that fact 1 can be noticed “pursuant to Evidence Code sections 451, 452, and/or 453,” and that facts 2-5 can be noticed “pursuant to Evidence Code sections 452 and 453.” (Request at p. 2:19-21.) No more specific basis for taking notice of any of the facts is described.

The request is denied. To the extent the request generally references Evidence Code section 452, subdivision (h), that subdivision does not apply to any of the purported facts. (See Gould v. Md. Sound Indus. (1995) 31 Cal.App.4th 1137, 1145 [“Judicial notice under Evidence Code section 452, subdivision (h) is intended to cover facts which are not reasonably subject to 16

dispute and are easily verified. These include, for example, facts which are widely accepted as established by experts and specialists in the natural, physical, and social sciences which can be verified by reference to treatises, encyclopedias, almanacs and the like or by persons learned in the subject matter.”].) To the extent that the request generally references Evidence Code sections 451, subdivision (f) and 452, subdivision (g), Defendants have failed to show that any of the purported facts meet the criteria for either section.

LEGAL STANDARD FOR DEMURRER

In ruling on a demurrer, the court accepts as true all properly pleaded material factual allegations but does not accept as true contentions, deductions or conclusions of fact or law. (Valero v. Spread Your Wings, LLC (2023) 88 Cal.App.5th 243, 253.) Code of Civil Procedure section 430.60 states that “[a] demurrer shall distinctly specify the grounds upon which any of the objections to the complaint, cross-complaint, or answer are taken. Unless it does so, it may be disregarded.” The California Rules of Court also require that the demurrer itself (distinct from a supporting memorandum) specify the target of any objection and the grounds. (Cal.

Rules of Court, rules 3.1103(c), 3.1112(a), 3.1320(a) [“Each ground of demurrer must be in a separate paragraph and must state whether it applies to the entire complaint, cross-complaint, or answer, or to specified causes of action or defenses.”].)

The court cannot consider extrinsic evidence when ruling on a demurrer. This includes declarations. The court has considered the declaration from Senior Deputy City Attorney Julia Van Roo only to the extent it describes the meet and confer efforts required by statute. Finally, “points raised in the reply brief for the first time will not be considered, unless good reason is shown for failure to present them before.” (Proctor v. Vishay Intertechnology, Inc. (2013) 213 Cal.App.4th 1258, 1273.)

DISCUSSION

Defendants demur to all three causes of action on the ground that they fail to state sufficient facts. (Notice of Demurrer and Demurrer at p. 2:4-12.)

First and Second Causes of Action: California Constitutional Right to Privacy

The complaint’s first cause of action alleges that the use of data collected by the ALPR cameras by the City of San Jose Police Department and other law enforcement agencies without a warrant violates article I, section 13 of the California Constitution. (See complaint at ¶¶ 66-67.) The second cause of action alleges that the same activity violates article I, section 1 of the California Constitution. (Id., ¶¶ 76-78.)

“Article I, section 1 of the California Constitution provides: ‘All people are by nature free and independent and have inalienable rights. Among these are enjoying and defending life and liberty, acquiring, possessing, and protecting property, and pursuing and obtaining safety, happiness, and privacy.’” (Hill v. Nat’l Collegiate Ath. Ass’n (1994) 7 Cal.4th 1, 15 (Hill).) The elements of invasion of the state constitutional right of privacy are: (1) a specific, legally protected privacy interest; (2) a reasonable expectation of privacy on the plaintiff’s part; and (3) a serious invasion of that privacy interest. (Id. at pp. 39-40.)

Legally protected privacy interests are “generally of two classes: (1) interests in precluding the dissemination or misuse of sensitive and confidential information (‘informational privacy’); and (2) interests in making intimate personal decisions or conducting personal activities without observation, intrusion, or interference (‘autonomy privacy’).” (Hill, supra, 7 Cal.4th at p. 35.)

“A ‘reasonable’ expectation of privacy is an objective entitlement founded on broadly based and widely accepted community norms.” (Id. at p. 37.) Circumstances, customs, and practices can create or inhibit the reasonable expectations of privacy. (Hill, supra, 7 Cal.4th at p. 35.) Whether the intrusion is voluntary is also a factor to be considered. (Ibid.)

“Actionable invasions of privacy must be sufficiently serious in their nature, scope, and actual or potential impact to constitute an egregious breach of the social norms underlying the privacy right. Thus, the extent and gravity of the invasion is an indispensable consideration in assessing an alleged invasion of privacy.” (Hill, supra, 7 Cal.4th at p. 37.)

Article 1, section 13 of the California Constitution states that “[t]he right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects against unreasonable seizures and searches may not be violated; and a warrant may not issue except on probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, particularly describing the place to be searched and the persons and things to be seized.” The test for determining if an illegal search has occurred under article 1, section 13 is whether a person has a reasonable expectation of privacy under the circumstances and, if so, whether that expectation was violated by an unreasonable government intrusion. (People v. Williams (1982) 128 Cal.App.3d 981, 986 [citing cases].)

The appellate court in Cartwright considered a similar privacy question in a different procedural context—whether using streetlight camera footage during a police investigation was a search that required a warrant. (Cartwright, supra, 99 Cal.App.5th at p. 101.) The streetlight cameras at issue in Cartwright were operated by the City of San Diego. The cameras were “fixed position and located throughout downtown San Diego and other parts of the city.” They captured “ ‘environmental data, like temperature, humidity, pressure, ... traffic data, like car speeds, car counts, pedestrian data, bicycle data, and even video data.’ ” They created “high quality wide lens footage.” They captured “only the ‘public right of way.’ ” Footage was “stored on each camera’s hard drive for five days; if it is not retrieved within five days, the camera records over the footage. (Ibid.)

The Cartwright court determined that reviewing the streetlight camera footage did not require a warrant because “Cartwright did not have an objectively reasonable expectation of privacy when he traversed a public right-of-way in downtown San Diego in the middle of a business day.” (Cartwright, supra, 99 Cal.App.5th at p. 102.) The Cartwright court distinguished the City of San Diego’s use of fixed streetlight cameras focused on the public right of way (and searches of data collected by such cameras) from the decisions in Carpenter v.

United States (2018) 585 U.S. 310 (Carpenter) [cellular phone location data] and Leaders of a Beautiful Struggle v. Baltimore Police Dept. (4th Cir. 2021) 2 F.4th 330 (Beautiful Struggle) [aerial photography system integrated with street cameras, gunshot detectors, and license plate readers], the two decisions Plaintiffs rely on heavily in their opposition to the demurrer.

Neither Carpenter nor Beautiful Struggle can be read to indicate that the review of footage from the streetlight cameras in this case amounts to a search subject to a 18

warrant requirement. The United States Supreme Court in Carpenter specifically indicated that its holding was intended to be narrow and did not extend to “conventional surveillance techniques and tools, such as security cameras.” (Carpenter, supra, 585 U.S. at p. 316 [138 S.Ct. at 2220].) Recordings from cameras, such as the ones that captured Cartwright’s movements in the downtown urban environment in the middle of a weekday, do not rise to the same “unique nature of cell phone location records.” (Carpenter, at p. 309 [138 S.Ct. at p. 2217].)

Indeed, “‘[a] person traveling ... on public thoroughfares has no reasonable expectation of privacy in his movements from one place to another.’” (Id. at p. 306 [138 S.Ct. at p. 2215], quoting United States v. Knotts (1983) 460 U.S. 276, 281, 282 [75 L. Ed. 2d 55, 103 S. Ct. 1081].) Indeed, as the court in Beautiful Struggle acknowledged, “People understand that they may be filmed by security cameras on city streets.” (Beautiful Struggle, supra, 2 F.4th at p. 345.) This is effectively the same principle Cartwright now argues against.

(Cartwright, supra, 99 Cal.App.5th at p. 103.)

This court is bound by Cartwright. (Sarti v. Salt Creek Ltd. (2008) 167 Cal.App.4th 1187, 1193 [decisions of every Court of Appeal are binding on all superior courts].) Applying that authority, Plaintiffs’ first and second causes of action do not state sufficient facts because there is no reasonable expectation of privacy in license plate data collected from cameras directed at public streets.

Plaintiffs attempt to distinguish Cartwright by arguing that Defendants’ system here is “far more privacy invasive” than the “small number of conventional security cameras” Defendants argue were at issue in Cartwright. (Opposition, p. 12:23-28.) While the court acknowledges the scope of Defendants’ system is broader than that at issue in Cartwright, the court concludes that this case is no so factually distinguishable from Cartwright as to allow the court to disregard that binding appellate authority.

The court also finds this case more factually similar to Cartwright than to Carpenter or Beautiful Struggle. Recording automobile license plate information from fixed cameras on public streets over time is less invasive than the continuous cell cite location data at issue in Carpenter; and the Carpenter court made clear its “decision is a narrow one” that did not “call into question conventional surveillance techniques and tools, such as security cameras.” (Carpenter, supra, 585 U.S. at p. 316.)

Recording automobile license plate information from fixed cameras on public streets over time is also less invasive than the citywide integrated system in Beautiful Struggle that allowed law enforcement to “captur[e] everyone’s movements outside during the daytime for 45 days.” (Beautiful Struggle, supra, 2 F4.th at pp. 334, 345 [“any single [Aerial Investigation Research] image—captured once per second—includes around 32 square miles of Baltimore and can be magnified to a point where people and cars are individually visible, but only as blurred dots or blobs”].)

Unless and until another appellate court issues a published decision taking a different position on the use of cameras capturing movement on public streets, this court must follow Cartwright.

Defendants’ demurrer to the first and second causes of action on the ground that they fail to state sufficient facts is sustained.

Third Cause of Action: Code of Civil Procedure section 526a

“Under Code of Civil Procedure section 526a, a taxpayer may challenge wasteful or illegal government action that otherwise would go unchallenged because of standing requirements.” (Coshow v. City of Escondido (2005) 132 Cal.App.4th 687, 714 (Coshow).) “To state a claim, the taxpayer must allege specific facts and reasons for the belief the expenditure of public funds sought to be enjoined is illegal. ‘General allegations, innuendo, and legal conclusions are not sufficient.’ ” (Ibid.; see also Humane Society of the United States v. State Bd. of Equalization (2007) 152 Cal.App.4th 349, 355 & 361 (Humane Society).)

A Code of Civil Procedure “section 526a action ‘will not lie where the challenged governmental conduct is legal.’ ” (Humane Society, supra, 152 Cal.App.4th at p. 361, citing Coshow, supra, 132 Cal.App.4th at p. 714.) When the plaintiff fails to allege sufficient facts to show that the challenged government conduct is illegal, the trial court may properly sustain a demurrer to the plaintiff’s taxpayer claim without leave to amend. (Herzberg v. County of Plumas (2005) 133 Cal.App.4th 1, 24; Taxpayers for Improving Public Safety v. Schwarzenegger (2009) 172 Cal.App.4th 749, 769 [declaratory relief claim].)

The complaint’s third cause of action depends entirely on the first two. (Complaint at ¶¶ 83-84.) Because those causes of action are foreclosed by Cartwright, the third cause of action likewise fails to state sufficient facts. The demurrer to the third cause of action is sustained.

Leave to Amend

A plaintiff bears the burden of demonstrating that a defect identified on demurrer could be cured through amendment. (Schifando v. City of Los Angeles (2003) 31 Cal.4th 1074, 1081; Shaeffer v. Califia Farms, LLC (2020) 44 Cal.App.5th 1125, 1145.)

Plaintiffs do not meet this burden. The opposition does not request leave to amend, much less explain how any of the causes of action could be amended. Because the court finds that Cartwright forecloses all causes of action, leave to amend is denied. (Hudson v. County of Los Angeles (2014) 232 Cal.App.4th 392, 408 [“If as a matter of law there is no possible liability, denial of leave to amend is proper.”].)

CONCLUSION

Defendants’ request for judicial notice is denied.

Defendants’ demurrer to all three causes of action in the complaint is sustained without leave to amend.

The court will prepare the order.

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