This story was originally published by Fresnoland.
Fresno, like dozens of other cities and counties around the country, has decided to walk away from Flock Safety, the company that has cornered the market on automated license plate readers for law enforcement agencies.
But the city isn’t ditching the license plate readers. Instead, they’re now looking for a new vendor to provide these cameras — and fast.
The next provider, which Mayor Jerry Dyer said the city expects to select by the end of the year, may have to comply with a new set of guidelines one councilmember is working on that codifies certain standards, such as a 30-day data retention policy and auditing procedures.
These proposed guardrails come after the Fresno Police Department identified a number of unauthorized searches of Fresno’s Flock data by out-of-state law enforcement agencies — an issue city leaders say are unique to Flock’s software.
That included some that specified “immigration” as the reason for the search, although those came from local agencies and not the federal government, according to Fresno Police Chief Mindy Casto.
So the question is, who’s Fresno’s next vendor? And will the new guys be any different?
Critics of the technology and its impact on privacy rights struggle to believe so.
“If Fresno is considering alternatives like Axon or Motorola or whoever, these systems all carry risks,” said Nick Hidalgo, a senior attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California. “They all capture a ton of our sensitive location information and allow cops to search that information with almost no cause.”
Hidalgo said that any set of guardrails without a key provision the ACLU is fighting for in courts — which is to require law enforcement to get a warrant first before accessing license plate data — isn’t going far enough.
“We argue time and again that the California constitutional right to privacy and to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures requires law enforcement to obtain a warrant before they go and rummage through our history of location information,” Hidalgo said, an argument they made in a case against the City of San Jose that a judge recently dismissed, although the ACLU plans to appeal.
While those questions will likely get addressed by the courts, there are other aspects of license plate reader technology that still need to be assessed, like whether they’re living up to the big promises of their makers.
At a news conference Nov. 6, Casto shared that between January and October of this year, Flock technology has helped solve 42 of 128 shootings and 16 out of 25 murders.
Many agencies are “damn near religious” about the claim that Flock technology helps them solve violent crimes, said Ian Adams, an associate professor in the Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice at the University of South Carolina. But, he added, studies have yet to confirm that.
Adams is the co-author of a working paper still awaiting peer review that found an 11% decrease attributable to Flock cameras in one specific category of crime: motor vehicle theft.
“Is it true that we see similar effects that we’re seeing in these property crimes — do we see that in much more serious violent crime? Does it help solving murders? Does it help solving assaults and kidnappings and rapes?” he said. “Police agencies tell us that it is, but there’s no study yet that has shown that in black and white numbers.”
Other questions still are up for local jurisdictions like Fresno to answer for themselves through this and future policies, like who within a given department has access to this data.
“It’s conceivable that you don’t need every officer or every employee of a police department to have ALPR access,” Adams said. “So figuring out access constraints is going to be important.”
‘A more invasive system’
At the Nov. 6 news conference, Dyer said Fresno officials have reached out to other law enforcement agencies around the state as they revisit their guidelines for automated license plate reader vendors, including the Los Angeles Police Department.
Like Fresno, the LAPD decided against renewing its contract with Flock earlier this year. But the Los Angeles City Council soon after approved a pilot program Axon to place hundreds of license plate readers around the city — a company with which the LAPD had a “decades-old relationship,” the Los Angeles Times reported.
Fresno has also inked several contracts with Axon over the last decade for a range of products. That includes a five-year, $18.3 million agreement in 2024 that came with 800 body-worn cameras, unlimited data storage through Axon’s Evidence.com and other products.
Axon, in fact, has a “technology-testing relationship with the Fresno Police Department in exchange for steep discounts” on their products, The Fresno Bee reported.
But to some, switching to Axon would be “even more frightening than Flock,” says Dave Maass with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which has joined the ACLU in the legal battle against law enforcement accessing Flock data without a warrant.
“They work off of the relationships they built with body-worn cameras and TASERs and Evidence.com, and they leverage that to try to get the license plate reader contract,” he said, “and then they want all of that to be integrated together.
“So one of the threats here is that suddenly you have this mega-surveillance system that license plate readers (are) just one part of,” he added. “If you integrate license plate readers with live video analytics of every live surveillance camera and all body-worn camera footage, various investigative third-party data platforms … then it suddenly is even a more invasive system.”
Maass also seconds Hidalgo in thinking that the technology itself, not just an individual vendor, is the issue.
The proof of that, he adds, is Fresno.
Maass pointed to a 2020 state audit of license plate reader policies across a handful of agencies around California, including Fresno PD’s, which pushed the department to update its policies on data retention and other aspects. At the time, Vigilant Solutions was Fresno’s vendor for license plate readers — a company that has since been acquired by Motorola.
“There were problems with how they used Vigilant. Now they’re dealing with Flock. They’re having problems with Flock, and maybe they’ll look at Axon or they’ll look at ELSAG or some of these other vendors,” Maass said. “They’re just going to hit the same problems again.”
Get the Flock out of Fresno, a group that’s been organizing to push the city to cancel its contract with Flock, echoed these fears in an Instagram post following the Nov. 6 news conference.
“It’s great that the contract isn’t going to be renewed, obviously,” an organizer said in the post. “It should be very important that we don’t trade in Flock for another brand that’s going to be doing the same exact thing. Because at the end of the day, why would we push so hard and work so hard to de-Flock Fresno just to have it be replaced with something else that’s doing the same crappy things, the same hurtful things to our communities?”
Council will soon look at proposed guidelines for automated license plate readers
This Thursday, the Fresno City Council will review Councilmember Nick Richardson’s proposed new policy to vet future vendors.
“Our residents deserve privacy protections, transparency, and accountability,” Richardson said at the Nov. 6 news conference. “Our officers deserve clear guidelines that allow them to do their jobs. We believe that we can accomplish both.”
The draft legislation largely mirrors what’s already established under Senate Bill 34, which became law in 2015.
One aspect of Fresno’s proposed policy that’s a step up from SB 34, Hidalgo said, is the provision that users of the license plate reader database must provide “sufficient detail to identify the authorized law enforcement purpose.”
Hidalgo pointed to the results of a public records request from the Electronic Frontier Foundation which found several instances in which officers filled out the reason for their searches, not with details, but with an “lmao” or “haha.”
But, he added, the only reason those “abusive uses of the technology” were uncovered was because jurisdictions gave the public access to those audit logs — a provision he said is missing from Fresno’s proposed legislation.
“I applaud Fresno for requiring law enforcement to provide a specific, detailed reason for the search, but I also encourage Fresno to make sure and make it clear that those audit logs — where that information would appear — can be made public,” he said. “Because otherwise, we’re just trusting that law enforcement will self-police their behavior, and we’ve seen time and time again that they do not do that.”
Adams, the University of South Carolina associate professor, said he and his co-author have also arrived at recommendations for auditing procedures through their research.
Ideally, he said, audits would be performed by a third-party, not the department themselves internally or the vendor providing the technology.
“If we want the public to trust this technology, then we ought to have independent auditing — just like our research,” Adams said. “We are independent researchers. We don’t work for Flock. We’re not paid by Flock. We’re professors at a university who are interested in technology and policing.”
And while he hopes studies like the one he and his colleagues led can help anchor the debates over Flock cameras, one study also isn’t “the end of the debate,” he said.
“We think it's useful to know: Hey, this technology does have an impact on crime. It does help officers and police agencies recover cars faster and make arrests of those responsible for stealing cars,” he said. “That’s good information to have.
“But it also isn’t the end of the debate. That doesn’t just mean, like, unconstrained access for everyone forever. That’s not what the science here can tell you.”
