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San Clara County supervisors voted Feb. 24 to cut ties with Flock Safety after officials and civil-rights advocates raised concerns that the company’s automated license plate reader network was configured in a way that allowed out-of-state law enforcement to access data without permission. The decision came after Los Altos Hills and Mountain View ended similar contracts, with those cities saying Flock enabled a national “lookup” feature affecting how their camera networks could be searched by police agencies elsewhere.
In Los Altos Hills and Mountain View, officials said the issue involved a “lookup” setting that was enabled without local authorization. Mountain View officials said last month that Flock had included the city’s camera network in a national lookup setting without city permission, which they said allowed unauthorized law enforcement agencies to access their data.
San José Spotlight, in reporting distributed through The Associated Press, said the practice was also visible elsewhere in Santa Clara County based on camera network audit logs. The reporting said police in Massachusetts, Georgia and other states appeared hundreds of times in an audit of Los Altos, where the city’s 18 cameras remained operational.
The records reviewed by San José Spotlight indicated that Los Altos’ network logged 20 searches by out-of-state police for “immigration violation” reasons in the first two months of 2025, even though Los Altos had set a filter excluding all networks outside Arizona. A civil-rights review by Secure Justice executive director Brian Hofer found what he described as unlawful activity and said the pattern suggested Los Altos “wasn’t paying attention,” according to the reporting.
Los Altos officials said Flock enabled a national and statewide lookup feature on their cameras without notifying the city or seeking permission. Los Altos officials said they switched off the setting after discovering it and said they did not believe camera data was unlawfully accessed. One immigration-related search appeared in Los Altos’ logs even though it had a filter excluding networks outside Arizona, the reporting said.
Los Altos City Manager Gabriel Engeland told San José Spotlight that the audit logs identify agencies within the broader Flock Safety network during a given period but do not show whether those agencies accessed or searched Los Altos’ specific data. Engeland said the city could not independently corroborate Flock’s internal system logs, though he said it believed its data had not been improperly accessed.
Flock Safety pushed back on the cancellations, saying they would undermine public safety operations and slow criminal investigations. In a statement to San José Spotlight, spokesperson Paris Lewbel said the company understood that communities expect guardrails and compliance with California law and said Flock had implemented enhanced safeguards, including disabling the national lookup feature for California agencies and blocking out-of-state discoverability and federal access to California agency data.
Santa Clara County’s Feb. 24 vote meant the Sheriff’s Office could no longer access images or data from its Flock cameras. Before the vote, the sheriff’s office had been operating license plate reader cameras in Los Altos Hills, Cupertino and Saratoga, the reporting said, with those communities contracting with the sheriff’s office rather than operating their own police departments. Los Altos Hills had already voted to remove its cameras before the county decision.
At the county meeting, some supervisors said they supported using license plate reader cameras but criticized the vendor. District 2 Supervisor Betty Duong said the issue was notice of a “bad vendor,” rather than an indictment of the sheriff’s office or its surveillance use policy, according to the reporting. District 4 Supervisor Susan Ellenberg took a different view, saying the concerns extended to license plate reader cameras more broadly and questioning whether alternative vendors would be safer.
Immigrant rights advocates argued that the technology’s risks go beyond vendor disputes and can expand the definition of crime in ways that affect dissent. Huy Tran, executive director of Services, Immigrant Rights and Education Network, said people were told the cameras were “there to stop crime” but argued that the broader consequences could include what happens when the definition of crime expands to include dissent.
The reporting also said Santa Clara’s logs, obtained by San José Spotlight, indicated the city’s network was included in searches by the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department for multiple months last year. In March, the reporting said, the network appeared in 5,600 out-of-state searches by the Nevada law enforcement agency, and it said Santa Clara has 80 license plate reading cameras. Police Lt. Eric Lagergren, who the reporting said is Los Altos police chief Saskia Lagergren’s husband, said Santa Clara was not aware of the issue until after the searches had been made and denied that the city actively shared data with Las Vegas thousands of times.
Lagergren told San José Spotlight that the logs reflect searches that included multiple agency networks, and the audit logs did not show the number of Santa Clara records returned or whether Santa Clara data was specifically targeted or transferred in each instance. A spokesperson for the sheriff’s office told the outlet that supervisory staff reviewed camera activity weekly and that the sheriff’s office had ensured national lookup features were not enabled on its networks.
California has barred police departments from sharing license plate reader camera data with out-of-state or federal agencies for any reason since 2016 under Senate Bill 34. The reporting placed that law at the center of the debate over how Flock Safety’s configuration choices and data-sharing practices affect jurisdictions considering or ending contracts for automated surveillance systems.