San Jose Leaders Seek Stronger Guardrails for Flock License Plate Cameras

(TNS) — Members of a San Jose City Council committee instructed staff Wednesday to develop possible safeguards for Flock automated license plate readers as a small group rallied outside City Hall urging leaders to cancel the city’s contract with the controversial technology company.

The protest, organized by the Safety Over Surveillance Santa Clara County Coalition, comes just weeks after the San Jose Police Department publicly shared that it fired a police officer earlier this year for accessing the Flock database to track a woman who had accused his cousin of domestic violence.

News of that improper access prompted city leaders to call for the implementation of stronger prohibitions on officers accessing databases and increased random audits of searches.

“With every single juncture, community members must be centered to understand truly the harms of mass surveillance,” said Kimberly Woo, a community organizer with immigrant-rights organization SIREN, one of the protest’s organizers. “It does not make sense to make policies if we do not know all the flaws and issues of the ALPR system.”

At Wednesday afternoon’s Rules and Open Government Committee meeting, five San Jose councilmembers voted unanimously to instruct the city manager’s office to develop a draft ordinance outlining unauthorized uses of Flock data and potential civil and criminal penalties for violations.

Potential safeguards to explore include prohibiting access to the Flock database on personal devices, implementing multi-factor authentication and establishing an audit system overseen by the Independent Police Auditor and other city departments. The city also was urged to advocate for state legislation implementing criminal penalties for unauthorized access.

“We’re all very concerned about the breach. I can’t express enough how concerned we are about the breach, so I look forward to having this formal discussion with council and how we’re going to move forward, and with the police chief present,” said Vice Mayor Pam Foley at the meeting.

The city staff’s analysis should take about three weeks to return to the rules committee. It will then be placed on a regular City Council agenda for discussion.

There are about 500 Flock cameras installed throughout San Jose and 120,000 nationwide. Public safety officials across the Bay Area have praised their crime-fighting benefits, including SJPD, which regularly attributes quick arrests of suspects to the system.

Earlier this year, the City Council implemented some guardrails on the devices, including barring the cameras from recording license plates of those going to houses of worship and reproductive health clinics and from storing data for more than 30 days.

But critics of the system say the cameras have created an unprecedented state of surveillance that presents particular concerns for immigrant populations.

In November 2025, several civil liberty groups — including SIREN and the Council on American-Islamic Relations, both organizations that helped coordinate Wednesday’s protest — sued San Jose, alleging that city authorities are violating the California constitution’s ban on unreasonable searches by sifting through license plate data without a judicial warrant.

In April, three San Jose residents filed a lawsuit in federal court alleging license plate searches violate the Fourth Amendment’s protection against unreasonable searches. The court is scheduled to hear arguments in San Jose’s motion to dismiss on Thursday.

Critics have similarly expressed concerns about “side-door searches,” in which federal agencies gain access to Flock data through other California agencies that conduct the search on their behalf. Despite SJPD utilizing a Flock feature that does not allow federal agencies to access data from the city’s cameras, an analyst found that SJPD allowed searches by other state agencies that were fulfilling requests for federal immigration agencies.

At the protest Wednesday, attendees led chants such as “data privacy is a right, we will fight with all our might” and “no safety, no peace, get Flock off our streets!” before heading into the meeting to share their concerns via public comment. Two protestors wore enlarged cardboard CCTV cameras on their heads.

“The city cannot continue operating a mass surveillance system while failing to enforce its own policies and failing to protect its own residents,” said Musa Tariq with CAIR’s Bay Area chapter. “Shut it down. Audit the system. Hold abusers accountable.”

The unauthorized access by an SJPD officer was an “egregious breach of public trust and data violations” and was followed by an “utter failure to promptly disclose what happened both to the public and the city,” Woo said.

If the city will not cancel its contract with Flock, the organizers urged it to suspend use of the system until the city auditor and independent police auditor carry out a full audit with community input on its methodology, which would then be shared with the public upon its completion.

“The severity of this violation calls for even stronger action to rebuild public trust, transparency and accountability in the system,” Woo said, noting that though the council has expressed that it recognizes the necessity of more controls on ALPR cameras, the current proposals are “far from sufficient.”

“We cannot legislate or truly eliminate the possibility of abuse within these ALPR systems,” Woo said. “The best way to eliminate any possibility of abuse is to turn the cameras off.”

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