California Cities Double Down on License-Plate Readers as Federal Surveillance Grows

Over the past decade, automated license-plate readers have quietly become a standard tool for law enforcement across California, adopted by more than 200 city police departments, sheriff’s departments and other agencies.

That’s despite a series of media reports demonstrating local AI-enabled ALPR databases are feeding a federal surveillance system used by the Trump administration against immigrants and others. While a short list of municipalities in other states, including in Texas and Oregon, have responded by canceling contracts, most California officials appear to be digging their heels in.

The tensions at the heart of the debate were on full view at Oakland City Hall on Tuesday night. More than three hours of public comment preceded the City Council’s 7-1 vote to renew and expand the Oakland Police Department’s contract with Flock Safety, the fastest-growing surveillance product vendor in California, according to the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Dozens of residents spoke in favor of the $2.25 million, two-year contract, including local homeowners association representatives and small business owners. Stephanie Tran, president of Oakland’s Chinatown Chamber of Commerce, told the city council that the chamber operates more than 50 Flock cameras in the neighborhood.

“These community-led systems have supported over 100 cases of investigations, from robberies to arson, car accidents, theft, break-ins and homicide,” Tran said. As part of the contract approved by the city council, the chamber will be able to continue sharing its Flock system data with the police department.

Other Oakland residents argued that the federal government’s data-enabled immigration crackdown trumps local crime concerns. “This surveillance technology has already caused harm in our communities, and all over the country,” said Alberto Parra of the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment Action, speaking in Spanish. “Oakland residents should not fear driving to work, church, or school, knowing that this data is going to be fed to a national system that’s accessible to ICE.”

Civil liberties advocates have sued both Oakland and San José, alleging their use of automated license plate readers amounts to a “deeply invasive” mass surveillance system that violates residents’ rights to privacy in California.

“ALPRs, operating at the scale that they’re operating now, with the kind of vendors that are running these systems now, are posing a direct public safety threat,” said Sarah Hamid, director of strategic campaigns at the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

“We’re living in a political climate where undocumented community members are being kidnapped off the street in broad daylight, where people’s healthcare is being criminalized, people’s political speech is being criminalized, and having this much location data information about everyone who drives in this country, and where they go, and when they go there, is fundamentally unsafe,” Hamid said.

Automated License Plate Readers are AI-powered cameras that capture and analyze millions of images, including vehicle location, date, time, as well as make, model, color, and details like dents and bumper stickers.

OPD has a policy outlining steps to follow when an outside agency seeks access to Oakland license plate data. Tuesday night, the council adopted a series of amendments to mollify data privacy concerns, including a “two-key” approval system requiring both the city’s Chief Privacy Officer and the OPD Information Technology Director to authorize any new data-sharing relationships, as well as quarterly independent compliance audits to be overseen by the City Auditor.

“Communities are in full control of who they share with,” said Trevor Chandler, director of public affairs for Flock. “Some communities choose to share with no one.”

In a recent lawsuit filed against OPD, privacy advocate Brian Hofer claimed the department violated its own rules, alleging there are records of millions of external searches of Oakland’s system. Hofer recently stepped down from Oakland’s Privacy Advisory Commission, which voted against reupping with Flock earlier this year.

Hofer, who advises cities and counties across California, points out that more than 80 California cities have adopted sanctuary laws limiting cooperation with federal immigration enforcement. But those policies, he argues, often stop short of governing how police departments collect, share and audit license plate reader data, a gap he said leaves agencies vulnerable to violating state law.

Under SB 34, California law enforcement agencies are required to adopt detailed usage and privacy policies governing ALPR data, restrict access to authorized purposes, and regularly audit searches to prevent misuse. Hofer calls many local approaches “performative,” arguing that city councils and city attorneys frequently approve surveillance programs without providing effective oversight.

His concerns echo findings by the California Attorney General’s office two years ago, after a state audit found “the majority of California law enforcement agencies collect and use images captured by ALPR cameras, but few have appropriate usage and privacy policies in place.”

Even if they do, federal laws supersede state laws. “If we get a federal court warrant, we’re still going to have to respond to it. We’re gonna still have to turn over the data,” Hofer said. “That’s why privacy folks like me are, like, don’t collect the data in the first place. Any data collected is data at risk,” Hofer said.

That risk is not hypothetical.

A few weeks ago, Richmond’s new police chief, Tim Simmons, shut down its automated license plate reader system after Flock notified the police department of a configuration error that could have allowed outside law enforcement agencies to run searches of the city’s data.

While the police department wrote in a Facebook post that it has no evidence any outside agency actually viewed Richmond’s data, Chief Simmons told Richmondside, “The fact that it was made available was outside the scope of what we’ve been telling people and what has been told to us. So that was enough for me to shut the whole system down.”

Chandler from Flock said the company has shut off out-of-state access to camera data from California law enforcement agencies. “We’re working in as proactive a way as possible to ensure that these agencies have default compliance,” he said, noting that the customers contractually own the data. Each law enforcement agency also decides how long data is stored before being deleted.

But Richmond officials are not alone in harboring misgivings.

In November, Santa Cruz officials decided to temporarily limit outside agencies’ access to the city’s license plate reader data and to review its agreement with Flock. The move followed testimony from Santa Cruz Police Chief Bernie Escalante, who told the city council that Flock disclosed earlier this year that it had allowed out-of-state law enforcement agencies to use a national search tool to access license plate data collected by California agencies.

Over the summer, the San Francisco Standard reported that OPD shared data from its camera systems with federal agencies. CalMatters reported that law enforcement agencies in Southern California have shared information from automated license plate readers with federal agents as well.

And in a recent analysis of 10 months of nationwide searches on Flock’s servers, EFF discovered more than 50 federal, state, and local agencies — including some in California — ran hundreds of searches in connection with political protests.

Hofer, who has sued Oakland twice over surveillance practices, said his frustration is not with Flock or its competitors in the industry. It’s with local elected officials. “They’re not connecting the dots. We are building these systems for Donald Trump. We are harvesting data for Donald Trump,” Hofer said.