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Across America, from tiny rural towns to major cities, cameras called Automated License Plate Readers (ALPRs) are stationed at key intersections, gathering information from every vehicle that passes by. Each camera is part of a huge network, and each image is added to a centralized searchable database.
The Ukiah Police Department has 14 of these cameras. They don’t just catch people who run red lights. Flock Safety’s technology just starts with the license plate. When there’s a network of cameras, the combined data clearly shows the travel history of a vehicle. AI-driven data analysis reveals its traffic patterns, predicts where it is likely to go, and can reveal all visitors to a given location. It can be used to target drivers who attend protests, health clinics, centers of worship or other sensitive locations.
In addition to capturing license plate data, the photographs can reveal images of the vehicle, the vehicle’s drivers and passengers and even people getting in and out of a vehicle.
When law enforcement agencies, prompted with scripts from Flock Safety, cite individual examples of major crimes solved in order to argue that mass surveillance is an important tool, they ignore that it’s a convenient shortcut around due process. For serious crimes, police have always had a standard legal process that includes making the case to a judge on why they should get a search warrant for location data, whether it’s from cell phones or service providers. Police treat ALPR databases as if no legal threshold exists, giving them free rein to track a person’s movements without any judicial oversight.
Is any of this legal?
The Flock system and all similar ALPRs track the movements of each person who passes them. The Supreme Court has stated in two cases, (United States v. Jones, and Carpenter v. United States) that our expectations of privacy include privacy of our physical movements.
In Carpenter v. United States the Supreme Court rejected the argument that venturing into public eliminates Fourth Amendment protection. Chief Justice John Roberts wrote that the government’s access to 127 days of cell-site location data, tracking movements on public roads, achieved near perfect surveillance, as if it had attached an ankle monitor to the phone’s user. The Court made this clear: “A person does not surrender all Fourth Amendment protection by venturing into the public sphere.”
Here in California, under Senate Bill 34, state law enforcement agencies are barred from sharing license plate reader data with out-of-state public agencies or federal entities. The law has been routinely violated; civil liberties groups in 2023 found that 71 California law enforcement agencies had broken it. Later that year, Attorney General Rob Bonta issued an advisory providing police with specific guidance on how to comply with the law.
So there are a couple of issues: First, public record reviews show that most law enforcement agencies within California contract with each other to share their data, so if even one agency is willfully violating California law, it opens what’s called a “side door” access for the Federal government to see everybody else’ s data.
Second, earlier this year Flock conveniently changed their search request options to remove any mention of ICE or immigration. Instead the drop-down menu for the purpose of searches is “investigation” or “criminal justice.”
California sanctuary laws bar police from assisting in immigration enforcement, and another law prohibits sharing data from automated license-plate readers with out-of-state cops for any purpose. Still, ICE has persuaded local law enforcement officers to run searches for them through Flock Safety’s entire network of data. CBP, including Border Patrol, also operates a network of covert ALPR systems in many areas.
An analysis of 10 months of searches on Flock Safety’s servers by Electronic Freedom Foundation found that over 50 agencies ran hundreds of searches through Flock’s national network targeting protest activity. These searches included activities by related to the 50501 protests in February 2025, the Hands Off protests in April 2025, and the No Kings protests in June and October of 2025. During 2025 many officers probed the nationwide network with terms like “protest” without articulating an actual crime under investigation.
Flock recently changed how one initiates a search on their platform. All an officer has to do now is claim an investigation. Since earlier this year, audits of Flock data simply won’t capture any kind of surveillance targeting at-risk communities or political free speech activity.
Flock made at least four changes to its standard Terms and Conditions (T&C) under the latest contract, dated Feb. 16, 2026. According to an April 2026 article by the ACLU, the changes include:
- Sale of data. Flock’s previous T&C stated that “Flock does not own and shall not sell Customer Data.” That language has been removed.
- A perpetual license. The T&C now adds a “perpetual” right for Flock to use customer data to “support and improve” its services — this lets them keep using surveillance data even after the customer has terminated its contract and can’t access it anymore.
- Liability, termination, and arbitration provisions. The new contract expands Flock’s protections against liability, potentially shifting liability costs to taxpayers. The risk of financial liability led Mountain View, CA to terminate its Flock contract.
What about Ukiah?
Ukiah states that its public-facing transparency page shows just a few hundred searches per month of its Flock cameras. But this number accounts only for the searches conducted by the Ukiah Police Department.
According to department records that were provided in a public records request, data from Ukiah’s Flock cameras was searched over 10 million times in 2025. Only 11,000 of these searches were by UPD. The rest were done by other law enforcement agencies.
10 million searches a year is over 27,000 searches daily, over 1,100 searches of our local database every hour of every day, mostly by “partner” agencies over whom we have no control.
According to UPD Chief Tom Corning, every search has a case number and is checked for appropriateness. Yet all partners have to do is report an “investigation” to access Ukiah’s data. With search terms like “investigation” and 1,100 searches every hour, it’s impossible for anyone to decipher if any given access is legal or necessary.
City staff assure us data is only retained for 30 days. If your movements are tracked as part of those 1,100 daily searches, it doesn’t take 30 days to get a picture of your activities. And they can keep tracking you on day 31.
Ukiah spends $35,000 a year of taxpayer money on a system that effectively shares everyone’s movements 24/7 with a lot of outside agencies. Is this loss of privacy even cost-effective?
According to Mayor Susan Sher at a City Council meeting, using the cameras led to 110 arrests during a four-year period.
The only year for which we were given complete data is 2025, when the Ukiah PD searched the camera data 11,128 times. Extrapolating over a four-year period, that’s over 44,000 searches by the UPD, yielding 110 arrests at a total cost of $140,000.
There are no guardrails to Flock
Cornerstones of the American legal system have always included the right to due process and the right of privacy. On both national and local levels, this translates into laws, policies, and procedures that balance the needs of public safety with the individual rights of people to move freely about in the world and for people to assemble peaceably free from surveillance.
Law enforcement officers and prosecutors have always always had a standard legal process for obtaining judicial permission to step past the boundaries and obtain warrants, whether to arrest, to search, or nowadays to get cell phone or email information.
The ability of any random police officer to enter the Flock database, instigating searches across not just local data but data from hundreds of “partners” and with just the vaguest of search terms, is an utter debasement of our legal system norms.
Mass surveillance by Big Brother was at one time in the realm of dystopian science fiction. It’s here now, and we were never even asked for permission to submit to this attack on our basic civil and human rights.
Take them down.
Over 20 years ago I remember sitting at a bar and the bartender saying a city cop just went through the parking lot and was writing down our license plate numbers. Nothing came of it as I recall but police surveillance has been going on for a long time now. With Flock cameras everywhere I suppose bar hopping is an extinct activity. As a matter of fact I wonder if there is a flock camera outside the bar parking lots, watching when you went in and how long you stayed.
Thank you for this detailed piece.
I recently had someone tell me that there are surveillance cameras in random public places. I told him: “No dude, you’re paranoid. That would violate our right to privacy even in public” but here we are. I had no idea. I appreciate it being brought to my attention. This is wrong and it needs to stop!
Its just the beginning. In both Communist China and in Russia mass surveillance is integrated with artifical intelligence and facial recognition to monitor citizen behavior in order to prevent protesting and identify critics against the government. In China there’s a camera for every two people. Russian law enforcement officers use it to track activists and opposition figures. Corrupt government officials sell data obtained from the government database in the Black Market. Its where it all leads to. Anyway, if you never do anything wrong you have nothing to fear.
An additional dimension is according to data cited by John Oliver, these systems can have an error rate of 30-40%. Combined with them changing their terms to absolve them from liability, how could anyone sign such a contract? Excellent reporting! Let’s get this contract revoked.
This is why we have and need regulations – as too many are motivated by selfish motives.