By the time the Santa Rosa Police Department’s community forum on its license-plate reader camera program was set to begin Thursday evening, the meeting hall on Stony Point Road was already at capacity. A large group of overflow attendees listened through speakers set up in the courtyard outsid...
By the time the Santa Rosa Police Department’s community forum on its license-plate reader camera program was set to begin Thursday evening, the meeting hall on Stony Point Road was already at capacity. A large group of overflow attendees listened through speakers set up in the courtyard outside.
It was the latest and largest in a series of events where Santa Rosa Police Chief John Cregan sought to explain the value of Flock cameras to his department and public safety and the local guardrails in place amid escalating pushback and reports of officer misuse of the technology nationwide.
Santa Rosa boasts the North Bay’s largest Flock network. Contracts and funding for that surveillance equipment will expire next year.
Cregan described the camera-equipped license plate readers as a “force multiplier” for his officers, “meaning that it gives them the ability, the additional tools, to be able to expand what their capacity is.”
He noted his desire “to leverage some of the technology and leverage some of the resources that are out there,” but, in a nod to the tension that has underpinned many of the community meetings on the issue, he added “not to the point where we lose trust of our community.”
Automated license plate readers are not new. At a fundamental level, cameras record plate numbers and log locations. Police can search the databases of the scans to investigate crimes or receive real-time alerts if a camera registers a flagged license plate. Law enforcement agencies have touted the cameras as a game-changing tool to boost crime solving, especially amid strained budgets that have limited staffing.
But skeptics argue that as the technology has expanded and advanced, covering large swaths of communities and allowing law enforcement agencies to share and access each others’ data, so too have the risks to civil liberties and data privacy. And, the potential for misuse or abuse within networks with vast amounts of data on the public’s whereabouts is too difficult to manage, they say.
Kelsey Vero with the North Bay Organizing Project’s Civil Liberties Task Force said the debate goes beyond one company like Flock. “What it speaks to, and the outrage we’ve seen lately, speaks to the outrage of mass surveillance in genera, especially now supercharged by artificial intelligence,” she said.
Once approved on local consent calendars without much debate, city and county contracts for license-plate reader programs have become a flashpoint of late. As a leading company in the space that has captured much of the market, Atlanta-based Flock Safety — used by over 5,000 police forces, including 350 in California, and thousands of neighborhood groups and businesses across 49 states — has faced particular scrutiny.
Beyond license plate readers, Flock offers a host of other tools, like AI-powered live video streaming, audio detection devices and drones that can be integrated into surveillance systems.
Research and reporting in the last couple years across the country have exposed a number of unlawful or unsanctioned practices: license plate reader systems being used for immigration enforcement even in states like California where that use is prohibited; Texas police tracking a woman who’d had an abortion; officers using cameras to stalk girlfriends or department critics; and misidentified vehicles leading to false arrests.
An August investigation by the Washington Post identified at least 69 police officials, accused, charged with or convicted of misusing the technology.
Last week, San Jose police disclosed an officer had been fired for using the department’s license plate reader system to track a woman who had accused his cousin of domestic violence.
Flock Safety and local jurisdictions have scrambled to add additional guardrails to close loopholes and limit abuse — reducing data retention times or the agencies data can be shared with, requiring regular audits of use — although civil liberties advocates continue to push back, and some opponents of the technology have turned to vandalism.
While many local jurisdictions remain committed, an increasing number of cities, counties, sheriffs and other institutions have moved to suspend or not renew their Flock contracts — more than 350 by one count. Others, like Sebastopol, have taken measures like establishing technology ordinances that set parameters on surveillance and transparency measures into local law.
Legislation to further regulate license plate reader use in California failed to move forward this year. In September, however, Florida’s Department of Transportation revoked use permits for license plate readers along state highways.
During a detailed presentation Thursday evening, Cregan acknowledged misuse elsewhere but said there has been none within his department. The training and additional protections in place in Santa Rosa set his department apart, he said, and ensure anyone who steps out of bounds will be held accountable.
He pointed to recent changes he said came as a direct result of community concerns. Those include limiting sharing of data to Northern California agencies and requiring they sign memorandums of understanding to comply with the department’s standards.
The department is implementing additional training and weekly — instead of monthly — use audits, as well as publishing the last 30 days of searches on the agency’s online transparency portal.
Vero of the North Bay Organizing Project noted those protections were added long after the program was established. “We are looking for guardrails to be robust before not after,” she said. And to that end, she said, while policies are a good step, they can change at the whim of who is in charge.
“The question is what regulations or laws are in place to make sure that our rights are protected as technology is implemented and evolves,” she said. “Ultimately, that is what we’re asking for, and that question hasn’t been spoken to.”
While Flock technology is used almost universally across North Bay law enforcement agencies, Santa Rosa has far and away the most cameras.
The city operates 129 cameras with another four awaiting installation, including 105 license plate readers, 13 AI-powered pan-tilt-zoom video cameras and 15 stationary cameras. The department also has access to the cameras of local businesses like Home Depot.
Funding came through a $421,000 organized retail theft grant and a federal earmark for $898,000, covering two contracts starting in 2024. Both contracts expire in 2027, and the city will have to decide whether to pursue outside funding or cover the expense with local dollars in order to continue the program.
According to the department’s online portal, the system has detected 770,986 vehicles in the past 30 days, and employees have conducted 747 database searches.
Cregan detailed a list of serious crimes he said the technology helped solve, including several homicides, robberies and a kidnapping in 2024 and 2025.
He described a changing Santa Rosa, pointing to the city’s 12 homicides in 2025.
For 2026, Santa Rosa counted its first and only homicide so far this past June.
“I don’t want to be a chief that says that it’s going to be Gotham here without the (Automated License Plate Reader) program,” Cregan qualified. “We have incredible men and women who are out there doing great police work. What I use this is to demonstrate… is that it is making a difference in these cases.”
“We may, at the end of the day, say, ‘It’s making a difference, but I still don’t believe in the surveillance,'” he added, eliciting a brief burst of applause.
The hour-long presentation to a room of at least 150 people was followed by a brief question-and-answer session, featuring a Flock representative. A department employee read a handful of the 245 queries submitted as required through a QR code.
Afterward, the crowd broke into small groups with police department representatives surveying and writing down questions from attendees. Cregan remained for the rest of the evening, taking in a steady stream of feedback from community members.
Many appeared frustrated and unconvinced, but the room hummed with engaged conversation. One woman said she appreciated understanding how the technology had been used to find missing people.
Among the crowd were members from neighboring law enforcement agencies and several top city officials.
“Am I at a place where I am ready to get rid of this tool…? Not at all,” Council member Natalie Rogers said. But, she emphasized her openness to further changes to find a compromise. “We’re in the midst of having conversations, and I think that’s good,” she said.
Jill Zieglar came from Windsor to learn more about how the technology is being used locally. She started researching the issue after the news in July that the Los Angeles Police Department would end its agreement with Flock. She has since gone through and listened to each board meeting where cities and counties and police departments have decided to abandon their contracts.
Zieglar did not come away comforted. She found the answers provided during the presentation, and especially by the Flock representative, evasive, she said. “They’re very good at presenting things to make it sound like a fail-safe system,” but even “good changes” by Santa Rosa can’t guarantee what the larger technology companies can and will do.
She and others pointed to Flock’s changing terms and conditions, for instance, outlining Flock’s access and use of data.
Changes, Flock spokesperson Lily Ho told The Press Democrat, had more to do with clarifying “terminology that is commonplace for software companies.” She said less than 1% of images across platforms, and stripped of all metadata, are used by the company to help train their machines, for instance, in identifying new types of license plates or vehicles like Tesla Cybertrucks.
“We’re not going to be able to solve this tonight,” Cregan said during his presentation. “My promise to each and every one of you is this is one step on a long journey ahead of us.”
Posterboards set up in the lobby after the meeting underscored what a lift that could be.
As they left, attendees put stickers into one of five categories representing their strongest belief or concern. Colorful dots filled the sections for oversight, accountability and data access as well as tracking and personal privacy worries. One lonely yellow dot sat below “Flock is a necessary tool.”
You can reach senior reporter Marisa Endicott at 707-521-5470 or