Quick Take
Santa Cruz will temporarily limit access to its license plate reader data from outside agencies and review its agreement with Flock Safety after the company acknowledged it had violated California law by allowing out-of-state law enforcement agencies to access local data. The city council will return in December with the results of its review and possible changes to the city’s contract with the company.
The City of Santa Cruz is pausing its participation in a statewide system that shares data from license plate cameras in order to review the program, saying the company it contracts with, Flock Safety, violated California state law earlier this year.
Santa Cruz Police Chief Bernie Escalante told a city council meeting Tuesday that Flock Safety, the vendor of artificial intelligence-powered surveillance cameras in Santa Cruz, Capitola and Watsonville, disclosed earlier this year that it had violated a California law by allowing out-of-state law enforcement agencies to use a national search tool to access license plate data collected by agencies in California.
Escalante said Flock’s national search tool did appear to include data from cameras in the city of Santa Cruz, but added there is no evidence that law enforcement agencies outside of California actually accessed the city’s data, or that any information from Santa Cruz’s cameras was shared with federal immigration agents. He said the violations of the law were not the result of deliberate city actions.
Recently, Capitola police acknowledged that federal and out-of-state law enforcement agencies had accessed a database of information collected from the city’s license plate readers on behalf of immigration officials between 2024 and early this year.
Santa Cruz City Councilmember Susie O’Hara said the city will stop sharing its data with Flock’s statewide portal while it reviews the system. The council will discuss the results of the review and any proposed changes to its contract with Flock at a Dec. 9 meeting. Until then, the city will allow other California law enforcement agencies to access Santa Cruz’s data only on a case-by-case basis to make sure their searches comply with local and state policies, she said.
O’Hara added that the city is developing a policy that requires any agency requesting local data to affirm it will follow local limitations and legal protections in writing, and will begin providing a quarterly transparency report of the police department’s use of the system. It was not clear if the city will consider voiding its contract with Flock. Escalante did not respond by publication time to Lookout’s request for comment on whether canceling the contract is among the possible outcomes of the review.
Flock said it made changes to its systems on Feb. 11 to prevent similar violations in the future, Escalante told Tuesday’s meeting. They include deactivating its national search tool, taking away permission for any California agency to share information from its database across state lines, and adding protections against searches related to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, border patrol, and other keywords involving immigration enforcement.
The police department has met with representatives from Flock Safety to confirm the changes, Escalante said: “The Santa Cruz Police Department does not assist immigration and customs enforcement officials in enforcing civil immigration law violations,” he said.
Despite those changes to the Flock system, and the company saying that it has remedied the error, vocal opposition to the cameras has only grown locally. Some residents have continued to urge the city and other local governments to stop using the Flock cameras, arguing there are not enough safeguards in the system and that the company is untrustworthy.
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