A Falcon roosts at the corner of Dartmouth Avenue and Club Drive, right outside Carlmont High School. It clings to a pole and watches over the street, unnoticed by drivers and passersby alike. But that Falcon is no bird. It’s a Flock Safety automatic license plate reader (ALPR) powered by artificial intelligence, connected to a network of cameras across San Mateo County and California. It can record the make, model, color, license plate, timestamp, and location of every vehicle under its watch, and stores that data for 30 days in a system that can be queried by thousands of law enforcement agencies nationwide. An analysis by Scot Scoop of city council records, public records requests, and nine years of news coverage found that over 675 cameras are currently active in San Mateo County alone, with transparency portals showing data-sharing across hundreds of agencies, including connections to the Northern California Regional Intelligence Center (NCRIC). These cameras act as nodes in an interconnected surveillance network, one that most residents have never been told exists.
Flock Safety is a private company founded in 2017 in Atlanta, Georgia. It manufactures, installs, and operates ALPRs, and as of March 2026, holds a $7.6 billion valuation, claims to operate in 49 of 50 U.S. states, and enables data sharing among more than 4,800 law enforcement agencies. Police departments are Flock’s primary customers, but other contracted groups include school districts, Homeowners Associations, and commercial businesses.
Falcon cameras capture identifying information of every car that passes by within their line of vision.
But the data they collect is not limited to a single instance. Within a distributed camera network, a vehicle can be captured repeatedly across multiple locations during a single trip.
Each detection instance is uploaded to Flock’s cloud infrastructure. Machine learning and computer vision systems analyze this data to identify patterns and correlate individual detections into a travel history. The database can then be searched by the contracting agency and, depending on inter-agency sharing configurations, accessed by other law enforcement agencies across the region, state, and, until recently, the country.
According to Flock Safety's Privacy and Ethics page, all data collected by their cameras is owned by their customers who contract the technology. By default, footage is retained for 30 days before being automatically deleted, though records of who searched the system, and why, are retained longer for auditing purposes. In theory, those audit logs serve as a check against misuse. In practice, critics say, they provide little. “It’s kinda useless in the sense that it’s supposed to be giving us this log file that lets you audit for abuse,” said Cris van Pelt, the developer of the open-source project Have I Been Flocked. “All we can really tell is that a search happened at some time, which doesn’t tell us anything at all.” Additionally, Flock customers may choose to publish a customizable transparency portal that shows their audit logs, the agencies they share their data with, the number of cameras they operate, and more. However, these portals may vary between different cities. For example, while Foster City publishes a transparency portal, there is no information regarding the agencies with which the city shares its data. Some, like Daly City, choose not to publish a transparency portal at all.
Flock in San Mateo County
From 2017 in Portola Valley to 2025 in Belmont, city councils and police departments across San Mateo County have approved contracts with Flock Safety. Today, nearly every municipality in the county operates at least some cameras, and most residents were never officially notified. “I didn't really hear about them until recently. I didn't hear about them when they were planning on putting them in,” said Belmont resident Liz Leach.
Since first adopting Flock cameras, the San Mateo County Sheriff’s Office has spent at least $805,501.37 on installation, software licensing, and related services, according to financial data obtained by Scot Scoop. Most cities in San Mateo County operate under an independent municipal police structure: they maintain their own police chiefs, budgets, and websites, and operate under the direct control of the city manager and city council. Belmont, San Mateo, Redwood City, and South San Francisco all fall into this category. A second group of cities, including San Carlos, Millbrae, Half Moon Bay, Woodside, and Portola Valley, contracts with the Sheriff’s Office for their city’s “police bureau.” In these jurisdictions, the city government does not have direct authority over policing. It can enforce limited performance objectives written into its contract, but day-to-day oversight, including how Flock cameras are used, rests with the Sheriff’s Office.
As such, a Belmont resident who objects to ALPRs can lobby the Belmont City Council. Meanwhile, a resident of San Carlos who objects must go through the Sheriff’s Office, an entity accountable to countywide voters rather than the city itself. Additionally, while city councils hold public hearings and hear public comments during their regular meetings, the Sheriff’s Office may only hear from the public in periodic town halls. When asked whether there had been adequate citizen involvement in the decision to install Flock cameras, San Carlos resident Michael Stafford answered: “Absolutely not.”
The Belmont Police Department oversees 10 ALPRs. Its multi-year contract with Flock Safety costs $70,600 and is funded entirely by the city’s general fund, supported largely by property, sales, and business taxes. The cameras are not individually marked or disclosed on any public map, and members of the public have no official way to know whether or where they have been recorded. “Their locations are not shared with the public for risk exposure management,” said Belmont Mayor Julia Mates, citing concerns about vandalism and avoidance behavior.
In response to that opacity, some open-source initiatives have emerged. DeFlock, is a publicly available map of user-submitted reports of Flock cameras. Have I Been Flocked lets users search for their license plate to see whether and when it has been queried in any Flock system whose transparency portal is public. Robert Smetana is the developer of Deflock's mobile app and works on daily operations for the site. “I started to map them out myself, and just the map of the ones I was able to personally observe got to a density that I couldn’t go to work. I couldn’t go to my mom’s house. I couldn’t go visit my friends without passing a half a dozen of these things,” Smetana said.
Accountability and the limits of transparency
While San Mateo County has expanded its Flock Safety network, other Bay Area and Central Coast jurisdictions have begun to pull back. In January 2026, the City of Santa Cruz became the first in California to terminate its Flock contract. Like most cities, Santa Cruz had conducted regular audits of their police departments’ use of Flock Safety data, including time-stamped entries for individual search events and mandated “search reasons.” However, when council members began to review those logs in detail, what they found unsettled them. Notably, California law bans sharing any ALPR data with out-of-state or federal agencies, including Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). That prohibition originates in Senate Bill 34, passed in 2015, and was further cemented by a 2023 bulletin from the California Department of Justice. The Santa Cruz City Council obtained audit logs showing that thousands of queries to Santa Cruz’s Flock system included search terms such as “ICE,” “HSA,” and others, suggesting use for immigration enforcement. Santa Cruz City Councilmember Susie O’Hara was among those who pushed to terminate the contract with Flock. “My issue was that we have so little control over how we're being surveilled,” O’Hara said. “If we can control this particular source of data, we should. This conversation was happening at the same time as the chaos was ensuing in Minneapolis, and I had decided, ‘if there's any chance that we are supporting this, I cannot be a part of it.’”
In December 2025, Flock Safety introduced an “offense type” dropdown menu to replace the previous free-text search reason field, describing the change as a step toward more accurate and consistent auditing. However, a Scot Scoop analysis of Foster City’s public transparency portal, covering searches conducted between late April and late May 2026, found that 40 logged entries listed no search reason. Many used informal shorthand, such as “sus veh,” and others used bare case numbers that provided no information about the subject of investigation. Some case numbers also did not follow the city's standard format, making them harder to trace. Some agencies have removed the reason field from their search audits entirely. For instance, Menlo Park’s public portal logs only a timestamp and the number of agencies queried, lacking a reason column altogether. The offense type column was not included in any audit logs retrieved from the May 2026 transparency portals for cities in San Mateo County, even though it is required to be maintained internally.
“The theory is that you're giving officers the accepted reasons, but there's no way to enforce that that’s what they're actually doing,” Smetana said. In an email sent to law enforcement customers in Ridgecrest, California, regarding transparency portals and search audits, a Flock Safety representative said, “There is nothing the public can gain from this report,” and suggested that agencies with concerns about non-compliant searches could choose to avoid enabling the feature altogether. Emails obtained by Scot Scoop show that similar verbiage was used in communications with law enforcement in Belmont.
Flock Safety has been under scrutiny for multiple incidents nationwide in which its cameras were used to bypass state laws and individual privacy protections, such as the immigration searches found in Santa Cruz. Another such case involved Texas police officers using Californian ALPR data to track a woman who had left the state and traveled to the Bay Area city of Los Gatos to seek reproductive healthcare. In a statement addressing such controversies, Flock CEO Garrett Langley wrote: “Local law enforcement, who are customers of Flock, chose to work with federal authorities for the safety of their communities. This was not a 'back door' into Flock, as some in the media have claimed.” But O’Hara, who met privately with Langley as part of Santa Cruz’s review, said she found his explanations evasive.
Even before the discovery of immigration-related search terms and the fear that side-door access had been given to federal immigration agencies, O’Hara noticed discrepancies between what Langley and Flock told the Santa Cruz City Council and what Flock was actually doing. On Feb. 11, 2025, Flock turned off its national lookup tool for California agencies, citing state law. Then, within days, it opened a four-month pilot granting direct system access to the FBI, Department of Homeland Security, and ICE, without notifying its California customers. “We found out completely after the fact,” O’Hara said. While Flock has since ended all federal pilot projects, the lack of communication and transparency during their active period led O’Hara and others in the community to distrust Flock. Beginning in fall 2025, a community organization called Get the Flock Out contributed to the push to discontinue the city’s relationship with Flock.
Flock has drawn scrutiny in other nearby cities, too. In early February 2026, the Mountain View police chief discovered unauthorized access by federal and state law enforcement agencies, and by the end of the month, the City Council voted to terminate its contract with Flock Safety. In a hearing after the removal of the Flock cameras, the Mountain View City Council also decided not to move forward with alternative ALPR vendors. Los Altos Hills also terminated its contract and removed all Flock cameras in January 2026. While the decision didn’t originate from a specific incident, like Santa Cruz and Mountain View, the decision stemmed from similar concerns about potential federal access and a lack of trust in the company. In February 2026, Santa Clara County amended its surveillance policy to prohibit the Sheriff’s Office from managing or using Flock ALPR data. The county does not have the authority to force the physical removal of cameras owned by individual cities, but the practical effect was the same in Los Altos Hills, Saratoga, and Cupertino. As those cities contract their policing from the Sheriff’s Office instead of maintaining their own municipal departments, banning the Sheriff from operating the system left their cameras without an agency to run them. Most recently, El Cerrito, a city in Contra Costa County, cited the same concerns about potential unauthorized access and unnecessary costs when choosing not to renew its contract with Flock in May 2026.
California law restricts sharing ALPR data with out-of-state and federal agencies, but it does not restrict sharing among California public agencies, and that exception is where local data travels the furthest. Of the cameras Scot Scoop identified in San Mateo County, the majority of operating agencies, including the San Mateo County Sheriff’s Office and police departments in Atherton, Colma, Hillsborough, Menlo Park, Pacifica, Portola Valley, Redwood City, and San Mateo, share data with the NCRIC, which is a multi-jurisdictional “fusion center.”
The NCRIC describes itself as part of the National Fusion Center Enterprise and says it serves as the regional “all major crimes” intelligence hub for Northern California, and coordinates information-sharing among the local, state, and federal levels. The NCRIC’s ALPR policy describes the center as actively supporting “multi-agency sharing, integration, and access of ALPR data, within the state of California.” That means a license plate in Redwood City can be searched not just by Redwood City officers or the other agencies listed in the city’s Transparency Portal, but also by hundreds of other agencies plugged into the NCRIC network. Data shared with the NCRIC can also remain accessible much longer. While local agencies typically delete ALPR data after 30 days, the NCRIC may retain it for up to 365 days if an active investigation is underway or if the local sharing partner has not requested a shorter retention period.
According to data from San Mateo County cities that publish transparency portals, six jurisdictions, including the Sheriff's Office, share their ALPR data with the NCRIC. A second group explicitly doesn't: Belmont, Brisbane, East Palo Alto, Hillsborough, San Mateo City, South San Francisco, and Woodside.
Mates said that Belmont’s Flock system is “currently set to be only visible to agencies within 50 miles of our city, meaning that agencies outside of 50 miles can’t see our network.” The NCRIC operates from a San Francisco building approximately 23 miles from Belmont City Hall, within the stated radius of sharing. However, it is absent from Belmont’s Flock transparency portal. Prior to Santa Cruz’s Flock Safety contract being deactivated, the county’s transparency portal showed that its data was also being shared with the NCRIC. However, when asked about the organization, O’Hara said neither the data-sharing arrangement nor the level of inter-agency sharing it represents had ever been brought before the Santa Cruz City Council. “That is not something that has even been brought to the council at all, to my knowledge,” O’Hara said.
Where the conversation goes next
Not every instance where Flock cameras have been reconsidered has resulted in their removal and a contract termination. However, a few have resulted in narrowed permissions for the ALPRs.
You have to focus your attention on preserving community trust. And it's just not worth it.
- Susie O'Hara
In March 2026, the San Jose City Council unanimously voted to tighten restrictions on its network of Flock cameras, though civil liberties groups called the changes insufficient and filed suits against the city in state and federal court. In Berkeley, the City Council voted in May 2026 to extend its existing Flock contract by up to 12 months, while overwhelmingly rejecting a proposed expansion that would have added drones and more cameras. In Belmont, Mates said the city council “continues to evaluate existing policies, oversight measures, and operational practices” surrounding its Flock program. The department has completed several spot checks and has not found evidence of out-of-state sharing, she said. Whether that ongoing review leads to changes, or whether other San Mateo County cities follow Santa Cruz, Mountain View, and Santa Clara County in pulling back, remains an open question. So far, no city in the county has publicly announced its intent to terminate its Flock contract. For O’Hara, the calculation comes down to trust. “Effective community safety is just as much about trust as it is about crime prevention and crime solving,” O’Hara said. “You can't have a conversation around public safety and what we are doing to improve public safety in an environment where people are feeling distrustful about what's happening at the federal level. You have to focus your attention on preserving community trust. And it's just not worth it.” Communities are at the heart of a solution, according to van Pelt. “People are not very involved with local politics, and a lot of the time, especially in smaller cities, city councils will only ever hear from their chief of police. If nobody's there to remind them that there's an alternate view, they might just put a signature to a contract,” van Pelt said. A Falcon roosts at the corner of Dartmouth Avenue and Club Drive, right outside Carlmont High School, one of 675 in San Mateo County. You don’t see them, but they’ve already spotted you.
Credits Jiya Venkatesh, Anoushka Swaminathan, Maximus Kwan