Tesla cars’ Sentry Mode cameras used by police in some investigations

The San Francisco Chronicle reports that police are using footage from high-resolution cameras in electric vehicles, known as Sentry Mode, in much the same way they would use video from a business’s surveillance camera.

In the San Francisco area, for some of their investigations, law enforcement has been taking advantage of the technology installed on board the famous electric cars since the summer of 2024. The Teslas are, in fact, equipped with a sentinel mode, high-resolution cameras that film the surroundings.

While not everyone uses Sentry Mode all the time because it drains battery power, reducing range, the driver activates it when they get out and sensors are triggered as soon as they sense movement. You can even get a live alert on your phone. The Tesla records everything on a USB stick in the glove compartment and when you get back, you can watch the footage on the car’s screen. Teslas don’t have a traditional dashboard, the on-board computer tells you where the clips to watch are in the recording. If a driver hits your bumper when he misses his parking space or a vandal has fun leaving his key lying around on the bodywork, you have the proof in pictures, even if most of the time, it’s just a pedestrian who walked a little too close to the car. In any case, the image quality of the Tesla cameras is impressive. While the manufacturer’s sales have declined this year in California, one of the brand’s biggest markets, tens of thousands of Teslas are circulating on the streets of San Francisco. Which has given ideas to the local police.

The police use these cameras in the same way that you sometimes see cops on a TV show asking to see the footage from a grocery store surveillance camera near a crime scene. The cops will ask the owner of the vehicle if they can view the footage stored on the USB drive. But if the owner is not present, the officers can also get a warrant and tow the vehicle. This has not become, let’s be honest, a common practice in law enforcement either. San Francisco Chroniclewhich discusses the phenomenon, cited only three cases this summer in Oakland, a city near San Francisco. On July 1, for example, a Canadian tourist arrived near the airport just as a tow truck was taking away his Tesla, which was parked near a camper van where a man had been found stabbed and shot. The police explained the situation to him, the tourist let them take the USB drive and did not have to go to the police station to retrieve his car.

These cameras can really help investigators, especially in cases of vandalism on the vehicle, there, they can be very useful, provided of course that the sentinel mode is activated. For investigations unrelated to the car itself, the press reports that the images of a Tesla Model X parked near a beauty salon helped in the arrest and indictment of two suspects in the murder of a 27-year-old woman during a shooting. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, an association that defends the right to privacy, criticizes the police strategy. The police would involve in an investigation people who have nothing to do with the crime or offense committed and who were not even present. Another subject for defenders of individual freedoms, do we want, as a society, that even cars contribute to mass surveillance?