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Amid statewide scrutiny over improper access to automated license plate reader data, the Redwood City Police Department is auditing its data-sharing practices.
Redwood City’s review of its plate reader program came after the Pulse requested records from the department in May, police Chief Kristina Bell said.
Flock Safety, the surveillance technology company behind the street camera system that helps track vehicles suspected of being connected to crime, acknowledged in March that some plate reader networks across the state were “inadvertently accessible” to out-of-state agencies, potentially violating California law.
For Redwood City, which is one of dozens of police departments in the state using Flock cameras, the controversy has raised new questions about who could search the city’s camera network, what the department knew from its records and whether safeguards added this year go far enough.
Flock said limitations in its earlier technical logging made it impossible in some cases to determine the specific cause of the unintended sharing.
Flock said it “takes full accountability for this situation” and has since added settings, logging and standardized data-sharing access.
One feature under scrutiny is Flock’s “National Lookup,” which enabled out-of-state and federal agencies to search thousands of cameras across the country.
Regional ripples
Palo Alto police said the department did not know its camera data had been included in the National Lookup searchable network. The department learned that Flock had disabled the feature for Palo Alto in October 2024 and for all California law enforcement agencies by March 2025.
Palo Alto police said the department worked with Flock and found no evidence that its data had been received by an out-of-state or federal agency through a National Lookup search.
It remains unclear whether Redwood City’s camera network was ever accessible through the same feature. When asked whether Redwood City police had Flock’s “National Lookup” setting enabled at any point, the city’s communications contractor, Jeanne Sullivan Billeci, did not answer the question directly.
In June, Bell said the city has found “no evidence of unauthorized law enforcement agencies accessing Redwood City’s ALPR technology.” The department has restricted its data sharing to Bay Area law enforcement agencies since February 2026.
A full update on the “broader program review” will be presented at an Aug. 12 meeting of the Public Safety Advisory Committee, Billeci said.
San Francisco, Menlo Park, Mountain View and Richmond are among the Bay Area cities where law enforcement agencies have identified unauthorized or improper access involving their automated license plate reader data.
Palo Alto has continued to use Flock but now requires outside agencies to sign memorandums of understanding before accessing its data; some cities have gone further. Mountain View, Santa Cruz and Los Altos Hills terminated their license plate camera contracts with Flock this winter.
The San Francisco Police Department said its data was among hundreds of agency databases that the Northern California Regional Intelligence Center queried over the course of a year, while conducting improper data searches on behalf of agencies outside California.
In response, San Francisco police cut off NCRIC access after discovering the improper searches, the department said in a press release.
In Redwood City, NCRIC searched the city’s license plate reader database almost 800,000 times during a two-week period in January 2025, according to the city’s ALPR search log obtained by the Pulse.
Looking back
When Redwood City first adopted the $243,750 program in September 2023, Police Sgt. Jeff Boyce said that Flock software can identify a vehicle’s color, make, body style, car type and identifiers like window stickers and roof racks — but does not take images of drivers or passengers, use facial recognition or access personal information about drivers or vehicle owners.
According to Redwood City’s ALPR policy, immigration enforcement, traffic enforcement, harassment, intimidation, personal use and use based solely on a protected class like race, sex or religion are prohibited. The policy also states that the devices do not detect faces, people, gender or race.
“It will not be used for any enforcement of immigration laws,” Boyce said in 2023.
After the Pulse requested every query made of Redwood City’s Flock database for a six-month period, the news organization identified two searches in which Redwood City’s Flock data was accessed by the Menifee Police Department for the stated reason of “immigration fraud.”
Bell said those January 2025 searches were authorized because they were connected to a criminal fraud investigation involving a suspect who allegedly posed as an immigration attorney to defraud victims. The Pulse is continuing to review hundreds of thousands of searches conducted since 2023 to determine whether Redwood City’s ALPR data was shared appropriately.
Bell said limiting data sharing to Bay Area agencies reflects the department’s ongoing effort to align its data-sharing practices with community expectations and the evolving policy landscape around ALPR in California. Still, she said the department cannot “quantify the investigative impact of that decision at this time.”
Redwood City currently has 25 active license plate readers and other cameras citywide. RCPD has conducted 268 searches using these devices in the last 30 days. During that period, nearly 747,333 vehicles were detected, though fewer than 1% were hot-list hits.
The city approved the license plate reader program in 2023 after police said a lack of evidence and investigative leads had contributed to low clearance rates in violent-crime cases, many of which involved vehicles.
From 2022 to 2023, for example, the city estimated that less than 11.5% of crimes against property in Redwood City were cleared by arrest. However, for 2023 to 2024, after the ALPR installation, more than 12.75% of these same crimes were cleared, according to the Redwood City-adopted budget for fiscal year 2024-25.
Since then, the police department said ALPR has “proven to be a valuable investigative tool” in helping officers recover stolen vehicles, locate missing people and identify criminal suspects. In late May, for example, Redwood City police used street camera footage to locate a hit-and-run suspect charged with vehicular manslaughter in the death of a 72-year-old woman.
Redwood City’s contract with Flock expires in September 2026. The timing, police said in the Feb. 13 press release, “uniquely positions the city” to gather feedback from the Police Advisory Committee and other stakeholders before deciding whether to continue with the vendor and technology.
