On February 2, Mountain View turned off its license plate cameras. The city's police department had run an audit of its own pilot program and found something it didn't expect: federal and state law enforcement agencies had been accessing Mountain View's data, in violation of the policy the city had approved.
Three weeks later, on February 24, the City Council voted unanimously to terminate the contract with Flock Safety altogether. "Public safety must be grounded in community trust," Mayor Emily Ann Ramos said, "and after hearing significant feedback from residents, the Council determined that this program does not best reflect our community's priorities."
Mountain View is not an outlier. It's one of roughly a dozen California jurisdictions that have cancelled, suspended, or declined to renew automated license plate reader contracts since the start of 2025 — a list that now includes the Los Angeles Police Department. The pattern connecting them is worth understanding, because it points at where this fight is actually winnable.
What these cameras do
An automated license plate reader photographs every plate that passes it, timestamps the location, and files the result in a searchable database. One camera is a traffic tool. Tens of thousands of them, networked together and searchable by any agency with access, is something else: a running record of where a great many people have driven, most of whom are not suspected of anything.
Flock Safety is the dominant vendor. The company operates more than 120,000 cameras across 49 states. Contracts are typically signed by a police department and ratified by a council, often as a consent-calendar item, and often without much public debate before the poles go up.
California's law is unusually strong
This is the part that makes California different, and it's the part most residents don't know.
Senate Bill 34, on the books since 2016, prohibits California state and local law enforcement from sharing ALPR data with federal agencies and with agencies in other states. It also requires any agency operating the cameras to adopt and publish a usage and privacy policy.
In October 2023, after years of pressure — including documentation from the Electronic Frontier Foundation showing dozens of California agencies sharing data with states that had criminalized abortion — the state Department of Justice issued a bulletin making the position explicit: out-of-state sharing is unlawful.
So California already has the rule. The question the last two years have answered is what happens when agencies don't follow it.
The enforcement gap
On October 3, 2025, Attorney General Rob Bonta sued the City of El Cajon. According to the AG's filing, the El Cajon Police Department had been sharing its license plate data with out-of-state law enforcement agencies across 27 states, and had continued after receiving clear guidance and repeated warnings to stop.
"When information about Californians leaves the state, we no longer have any say over how it is used or shared," Bonta said. The petition asks the San Diego County Superior Court to declare the practice unlawful and order it stopped.
One lawsuit against one city, four years after the guidance was first issued, is not a compliance regime. And Mountain View's experience suggests why local audits matter so much: the city only learned its data had been improperly accessed because its own police department went looking.
Where California has pulled back
| Jurisdiction | What happened | When |
|---|---|---|
| Eureka | Council voted against cameras | Feb 2025 |
| Santa Cruz | Contract ended | Jan 2026 |
| Los Altos Hills | Deployment discontinued | Jan 2026 |
| Cupertino | Cancelled, following Santa Clara County board action | Feb 2026 |
| Saratoga | Cancelled, following Santa Clara County board action | Feb 2026 |
| Mountain View | Cameras off after audit; contract terminated unanimously | Feb 2026 |
| Oxnard PD | Cameras suspended | Feb 2026 |
| El Cerrito | Voted to end contract; removal by Aug 18 | May 2026 |
| Bishop | Council moved to cancel | Jun 2026 |
| LAPD | Let contract expire, citing civil liberties concerns | Jul 2026 |
| Stanford | Replaced Flock with an alternative system | Aug 2026 |
| Campbell | Cancelled; moved to an in-house system | 2026 |
The LAPD decision is the largest of these by a wide margin. The department let its Flock contract lapse in mid-July, citing serious concerns over civil liberties and privacy. Flock said publicly that the move came as a surprise.
This isn't only a California story
Nationally, more than 50 agencies or communities have cancelled, suspended, rejected, or deactivated Flock systems since the beginning of 2026, according to the grassroots tracking project DeFlock.
The reporting driving that has been consistent and grim. Nearly 50 officers around the country have been charged with or accused of using Flock to track romantic partners and family members; in Savannah, Georgia, six employees were fired in July after investigators found unauthorized searches of personal acquaintances. A Wisconsin woman was pulled over at gunpoint after her vehicle was incorrectly flagged in connection with a homicide.
Flock has responded. On August 14 the company announced it was cutting its recommended data retention from 30 days to 7, adding case-specific preservation, restricting which agencies can search for which categories of offense, and requiring case codes on all searches by year's end. Whether those are meaningful limits or a defensive crouch is exactly the argument now happening in council chambers around the state.
Why this is a local fight
Here is the thing that makes license plate surveillance unusual as an organizing target: the decision is made by your city council, in public, on a schedule you can look up.
The contracts come up for renewal. The vendor pitch is close to identical from town to town, and so are the counterarguments. A resident in one city who has already sat through that meeting knows what the next city is about to hear. Nearly every cancellation on the list above followed sustained local pressure, a records request, or an audit that someone asked for.
That's the premise behind the ALPR De-Flock Working Group, newly forming within the California Indivisible State Network. The idea is to stop making every city start from zero — pooling research on which agencies hold contracts and what their policies say, sharing what has actually worked in council chambers, and tracking the wins. The ACLU's "Get the Flock Out" campaign and DeFlock's public camera map are useful starting points, and the group is coordinating with that broader effort rather than duplicating it.
The group is openly recruiting co-leads, researchers, writers, and volunteers. If you have ever wanted an organizing project where reading a contract carefully counts as a real contribution, this is that project.
Sign up for the ALPR De-Flock Working Group here.
A good first question for your own city: does your police department operate ALPR cameras, and if so, has it published the usage and privacy policy SB 34 requires? That document is public, and its absence is itself a finding.
