By admin The proliferation of ALPRs — Automatic License Plate Recognition cameras — represents another step in our country’s quickening march toward a total lack of privacy. The use of these cameras promotes law enforcement’s reliance on unproven technology that is incompatible with a free society.
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Communities across the nation, and right here in Sacramento County, must organize to remove these cameras from their streets, or live with the consequences of false reports and false detainments, and even stalking by law enforcement — all incidents that have already occurred.
ALPR — an AI-powered technology more commonly known by one of its many brand names, “Flock” — is actually a misnomer: These cameras aren’t simply license plate readers or traffic cameras, which are triggered by an event such as speeding or driving through a toll booth. ALPRs are constantly turned on, gathering huge amounts of data on anyone who drives past them.
That data is then stored by the police departments who contract with companies like Flock, Axon, Vigilant Solutions, Genetec, PlateSmart and many more. There is no expectation of privacy in public spaces, but Americans can expect privacy of movement.
According to maps.deflock.org, which pinpoints the location of ALPRs across the country, there are more than 1,000 ALPR cameras in the Sacramento region. The cities of Rancho Cordova and Elk Grove both contract with Flock, while the Sacramento Police Department contracts with Vigilant Solutions, a subsidiary of Motorola Solutions. The Sacramento County Sheriff’s Office use Flock cameras.
That begs the real question at the heart of the issue: How long should law enforcement be allowed to keep mountains of data on the movement of private citizens?
In a recent op-ed for The Bee, U.C. Berkeley Law Dean Erwin Chemerinsky pointed out that the Supreme Court decided in a 2013 case that “time-stamped data provides an intimate window into a person’s life, revealing not only his particular movements, but through them his familial, political, professional, religious and sexual associations. These location records hold for many Americans the privacies of life.”
A bill now in the Legislature would require that state and local law enforcement agencies delete license plate recognition data after 30 days, unless there is a proven need to retain it.
Senate Bill 1013, also known as the Automated License Plate Recognition Data Accountability Act, by Sen. Sabrina Cervantes, D-Riverside, would only allow law enforcement to keep data past the 30-day limit if the license plate is on an authorized “hot list” which includes stolen vehicles, a car that matches an AMBER or missing person call, if the vehicle is on a wanted list or if the data is in the evidence file of an active investigation.
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It’s a good start but how much indiscriminate access to data should government and law enforcement really be allowed to have?
A recent report by Business Insider found that, between 2023 and 2024, Flock cameras in the city of Roseville generated nearly 1,500 alerts for vehicles identified as stolen or linked to felony crimes. More than 1,000 of those alerts, or 71%, involved a license plate misread.
DeFlock Elk Grove, a citizen advocacy group, recently released their own findings based on public record requests and found that there had been 8.3 million searches made of Elk Grove residents’ vehicle travel data between 2021 and March 2026. Of that number, the Elk Grove Police Department performed only 260,000, just 3% of the total searches.
The other 97% of searches were made by other entities, including out-of-state agencies such as the Federal Bureau of Investigation and an agency simply listed as the “United States Border Control – Grand Forks Sector MN.”
This happened in our community in spite of a 2016 state law (Senate Bill 34) that prohibits sharing data with out-of-state law enforcement and federal agencies. Elk Grove’s City Council voted in April to extend its contract with Flock Safety through 2028. The program has cost taxpayers in that city roughly $1.6 million.
“ICE and CBP have repeatedly used Flock to go after immigrants without warrants,” reports the American Civil Liberties Union on its website. “Just think about how much someone could learn about your life if cameras constantly tracked where you drove. They could find out which doctors you visit, what house of faith you worship at, who you visit or drive around with — even which political meetings and protests you attend.”
ALPR cameras repeatedly violate our state laws and right to privacy, and yet they are ubiquitous throughout our communities. Cities that contract with ALPR companies claim that our data is safe, but these cameras log license plates, vehicle characteristics and location data into a massive, searchable database: Every move you make can be tracked.
This isn’t a dystopian future I’m describing — the surveillance state is already here. But the good news is that nearly 100 cities across the nation have already bowed to public pressure to cancel their contracts with ALPR companies, including the cities of Mountain View, Eureka, El Cerrito and Richmond, along with Santa Clara County.
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Sacramento, it’s on us to get the Flock out.