Santa Cruz the First in California to Terminate Its Contract With Flock Safety

Santa Cruz has terminated its contract with Flock Safety, the automated license plate reader operator, over data privacy concerns.

The Santa Cruz City Council voted 6-1 Tuesday to terminate the city’s contract with Flock, citing reports the city’s data has been accessed by out-of-state agencies, at a time when the Trump administration is pursuing an increasingly aggressive immigration enforcement agenda.

“For us, the threat to our civil liberties was greater than any benefit we could get from the flawed product,” said Mayor Fred Keeley, who voted against the Flock contract in 2024.

“We’re not interested, as they continue to develop their product, to be an experiment for a system which appears to have enormously big holes in it that they discover every day and try to patch to fix,” he said, adding he doesn’t fault the Santa Cruz Police Department.

Last November, Santa Cruz police Chief Bernie Escalante confirmed the city’s Flock data had been accessed by out-of-state agencies prompting city officials to temporarily limit outside agencies’ access to the city’s license plate reader data and to review its agreement with Flock.

“California for ten years has prohibited the sharing of license plate data out of state. Ten years!” said Peter Gelblum, chair of the ACLU’s Santa Cruz County Chapter told KQED.

According to Goldblum and other civil liberties advocates, Santa Cruz is the first city in California to end its Flock contract. He credited the Trump administration’s immigration policies for dialing up the sense of urgency in the sanctuary city, as well as data compiled by the recently formed grassroots group Get the Flock Out.

They laid out a case that included the finding that, between June and October 2025, state agencies accessed Santa Cruz camera data roughly 4,000 times on behalf of federal law enforcement, including U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, in violation of California’s SB 34.

Under SB 34, California law enforcement agencies are required to adopt detailed usage and privacy policies governing license plate reader data, restrict access to authorized purposes, and regularly audit searches to prevent misuse.

“And yet, the typical standard Flock contract, which the agencies in Santa Cruz County all signed, enables nationwide sharing, and nationwide sharing was going on the entire time,” Gelblum said.

A Flock spokesman told KQED the company has always been willing to comply with requests from law enforcement agencies to shut down outside access to data, to ensure compliance with state and local laws.

Trevor Chandler, director of public affairs for Flock, said the company is committed to honoring the values of every community, so that their civil liberty concerns “don’t have to come at the expense of community safety. All of those tools to customize sharing … can be customized at any moment, for any reason, by any city.”

Though precise tallies differ, civil liberties advocates say roughly 30 municipalities nationwide have recently canceled their contracts with Flock. But Chandler said Flock doesn’t feel threatened by the increased scrutiny.

“We saw Oakland put their program on pause, then went on to reauthorize it. We saw San Diego put their program on pause, customized safety features, then reauthorized it. So if the conversation with Santa Cruz comes back, we’re happy to have that conversation,” Chandler said.

Santa Cruz first signed its contract with Flock in 2024, and it was scheduled to expire on March 27. Tuesday’s vote allows the city to terminate the agreement with 30 days’ notice, or Feb. 12 at the earliest.

“Santa Cruz got it right,” Sarah Hamid, Director of Strategic Campaigns with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, wrote KQED. “Santa Cruz joins nearly two dozen jurisdictions in 2025 that canceled or rejected Flock contracts by exercising procurement power—local democracy’s most underutilized tool. These communities recognized that Flock’s surveillance risks are difficult to adequately mitigate through policy alone, and chose instead to invest in public safety approaches that don’t require mass surveillance infrastructure.”