Quick Take
While the City of Santa Cruz has canceled its contract with Flock Safety, Capitola and Watsonville expect to keep working with the company. They are the only two cities in the county utilizing the Atlanta-based company’s automated license plate readers, and the cities' police chiefs say the technology has helped solve many cases, including 80 in Watsonville alone.
Only two cities in Santa Cruz County, Capitola and Watsonville, have active contracts with Flock Safety now that the Santa Cruz City Council voted to end its contract with the Atlanta-based vendor of automated license plate reader systems.
Despite several data breaches in Capitola and Santa Cruz in 2024, the two jurisdictions with active contracts intend to continue using the system, officials told Lookout. Capitola is likely to renew its contract when it expires in April, and Watsonville approved a new two-year contract in September that increased the number of cameras in the city from 20 to 37.
FLOCK CAMERAS: Read Lookout’s news and Community Voices opinion coverage here
Flock Safety has come under fire in recent months, after the company violated a state law by allowing out-of-state law enforcement agencies to use its national search tool to access license plate data collected by agencies in California, including by the police departments in both Santa Cruz and Capitola. Local grassroots organization Get The Flock Out, which opposes the cameras, has compiled additional data showing similar violations both by state agencies and by individual bad actors outside of California.
After these data breaches, Capitola Police Chief Sarah Ryan made amendments to the city’s contract with Flock Safety and the company disabled its national search tool. The contract amendments required other California law enforcement agencies to sign a waiver to affirm their compliance with state law before accessing Capitola’s data. Another amendment said Flock can’t replace or alter the city’s cameras without explicit permission from the police department.
Ryan told Lookout on Wednesday that she believes the changes are adequate to protect data and privacy. The contract includes 10 cameras and costs $68,350 over its two-year span.
At this point, she expects to renew the city’s contract with Flock when it expires in April, “as long as they continue to uphold their end of the agreement and the modifications to the contract,” she said. “They’re in the hot seat to stay in business with people. They have a great tool, but it’s scaring people.”
Ryan said she was “a little surprised” that Santa Cruz pulled out of its contract, and said her perspective aligns more with Councilmember Sonja Brunner, who cast the one dissenting vote on the seven-member Santa Cruz City Council because she wanted to keep the contract, with numerous changes.
“I’ve been around long enough to see other changes in technology, like body cameras, and there are a lot of growing pains that happen,” Ryan said. “It’s unfortunate that this tool is coming in at a time when people are so afraid of the federal government.”
Ryan reiterated that the cameras have been a useful tool for the city’s police department, but said she did not know the exact number of criminal cases resolved with the help of Flock cameras. She added that, if she found deliberate misuse of the system by an agency or individual, pulling out of the contract would be an option.
“But we’re watching it pretty closely, and I’d have no problem stepping away if it becomes an unproductive tool,” she said.
Capitola City Councilmember Melinda Orbach did not respond to Lookout’s request for comment by publication time, but Vice Mayor Gerry Jensen said he supports the camera system, despite the “concerning” data breaches. He added that he believes Ryan and the police department took the right steps to address the privacy issues.
“I’m supportive of using the system until our chief or citizen advisory council comes back and says they have serious concerns or there are more breaches,” he said.
While Capitola is a small city of less than 10,000 people with only 10 active cameras, Watsonville, with more than 52,000 residents, is the second-largest city in the county, and has 30 Flock cameras currently gathering images and data. Another seven will be going up after the California Department of Transportation gives the city permission to install them.
The current two-year contract for 37 cameras will run until September 2027, and costs $251,000 in total. The city’s previous contract for 20 cameras, which ran from September 2023 to September 2025, cost $132,000.
Watsonville Interim Police Chief David Rodriguez said that in his 19 years with the department, he’s seen a lot of technological change. But what matters more for the safety of Watsonville is another trend he’s observed in his career: the falling number of qualified applicants to join the police force. He said Flock is a great tool to help manage the department’s persistent understaffing problem.
“Think about posting 37 officers at the same locations as the cameras. We don’t have that capability. No department has that capability,” he said. “This allows us to have a presence in those areas and more direction for our officers.”
Rodriguez added that many of the Flock cameras in Watsonville help cover the major arteries that flow into and out of the county, such as Highways 152 and 129 that cut right through the city.
He said that during the city’s first Flock contract, from September 2023 to September 2025, the department credited 80 arrests to the use of the Flock system. Of those cases, 19 were burglaries and 15 were gun-violence incidents. The department also recovered and returned 28 stolen vehicles to their owners, according to Rodriguez. More recently, the department used Flock images to solve a fatal hit-and-run crash that killed a 51-year-old cyclist in October, he said.
While he’s aware of the concerns surrounding Flock and takes them seriously, Rodriguez said the Watsonville Police Department currently has no issues with the system.
“We don’t divulge information to federal agencies, let alone ICE, and we don’t share our data with agencies outside California,” he said. “Our policy calls for one audit a year [of the Flock system] and we do one audit per month. We’re doing this to be accountable to ourselves, our community, and to show them we’re using [the cameras] for the right reasons and right situations.”
Watsonville City Councilmember Vanessa Quiroz-Carter did not return Lookout’s request for comment by publication time, but Councilmember Jimmy Dutra said he believes the city’s residents want public safety taken seriously, as reflected by the passage of Measure Y in 2020, a ballot measure that raises money for police and fire personnel and public safety equipment updates with a half-cent sales tax. He said he sees Flock as one of the city’s public safety tools.
Dutra said he is not overly concerned about Flock data being used for immigration enforcement because the city has used the technology responsibly since its introduction. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents detained at least one person in Watsonville over the Martin Luther King Day weekend.
“Immigration issues have been going on for a long time. We just have a president who is ruthless and doing things in a hostile way,” he said. “They’re clearly getting names and coming into communities, but we’re not helping with that and Flock is not giving it to them.”
Dutra said he is aware of the company’s past mistakes, and said the city is committed to protecting its residents. Using the cameras, he said, is a trade-off that each city has to weigh individually.
“I think the question is where is the line, and where do people stand on being safe?” Dutra said. “That’s what we have to ask ourselves.”
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