Out-of-state police access Silicon Valley license plate readers

San José Spotlight has learned the practice repeated elsewhere in the county.

Police in Massachusetts, Georgia and other states appeared hundreds of times in a camera network audit of neighboring Los Altos, whose 18 cameras remain operational. The city’s network logged 20 searches by out-of-state police for “immigration violation” reasons in the first two months of 2025, according to records obtained by this news outlet.

California law has barred police departments from sharing license plate reading camera data with out-of-state or federal agencies for any reason since 2016, under Senate Bill 34. The law has been invoked in debates about the cameras’ use and their role in federal immigration enforcement.

“This looks unlawful,” Brian Hofer, executive director of Bay Area civil rights group Secure Justice, told San José Spotlight. He reviewed multiple camera records at this news outlet’s request. “It definitely looks like Los Altos wasn’t paying attention.”

Los Altos officials said Flock had enabled a national and statewide “lookup” feature on their network of cameras without notifying the city or seeking its permission. Officials said they switched off the setting after discovering it, and added they don’t believe camera data was unlawfully accessed. One immigration-related search appeared in Los Altos’ logs even though it had set a filter excluding all networks outside Arizona, according to the data.

“The network audit identifies all agencies within the broader Flock Safety network during a given period. It does not indicate they had access to or searched Los Altos’ specific data,” City Manager Gabriel Engeland told San José Spotlight. “While we believe our data has not been improperly accessed, this can ultimately only be confirmed by Flock. … We are limited by the fact that we cannot independently corroborate their internal system logs.”

Flock Safety spokesperson Paris Lewbel said the contract cancelations will move public safety backward and prolong the time it takes to solve criminal cases.

“We understand communities expect strong guardrails and full compliance with California law,” Lewbel told San José Spotlight. “Flock has implemented enhanced safeguards across the state, including disabling the national lookup feature for California agencies, blocking out-of-state discoverability, preventing federal access to California agency data and supporting agencies in auditing and confirming their settings.”

The Los Altos City Council had already adopted a policy restricting data sharing. In November, the city further restricted its data sharing to police departments in Santa Clara, San Mateo, Alameda and Santa Cruz counties. The city revoked search approvals for every other California agency outside this four-county boundary, including the California Highway Patrol.

“I am disappointed in some of Flock’s business practices that have been out of our control and of which we have been unaware,” Los Altos Police Chief Saskia Lagergren told San José Spotlight. “I have been frustrated with the lack of transparency by Flock and with their lack of communication to their customers about the various settings in their system.”

Santa Clara unaware

Santa Clara’s camera logs, obtained by this news outlet, show the city’s network was included in thousands of searches by the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department for multiple months last year. In March, Santa Clara’s network was included in 5,600 out-of-state searches by the Nevada law enforcement agency. There are 80 license plate reading cameras in the city.

Santa Clara Police Lt. Eric Lagergren — who is the Los Altos police chief’s husband – said Santa Clara wasn’t aware of the issue until after the searches had been made. He similarly denied the notion that Santa Clara actively shared data with Las Vegas thousands of times.

“Those logs reflect instances in which a search query included multiple agency networks,” Lagergren told San José Spotlight. “The audit logs do not show the number of Santa Clara records returned in response to any query, nor do they indicate that Santa Clara data was specifically targeted or transferred in each instance.”

The Feb. 24 board of supervisors vote to cut ties with Flock means the Sheriff’s Office cannot access any images or data from its Flock cameras. Before the vote, the sheriff’s office had been operating license plate reading cameras in Los Altos Hills, Cupertino and Saratoga, which all contract with the sheriff rather than having their own police departments. The Los Altos Hills Town Council voted to remove its cameras prior to the county’s vote.

Some supervisors stood by the use of license plate reader cameras, but couched their concerns solely on Flock as a vendor.

“This is not an indictment of our sheriff’s office. This is not an indictment of our surveillance use policy,” District 2 Supervisor Betty Duong said at the meeting. “What we have here is notice of a bad vendor that all signs are telling us to not get in bed with.”

District 4 Supervisor Susan Ellenberg differed with her colleagues and took issue with the license plate reading cameras as a whole.

“Alternative (vendors) are not necessarily any safer and we don’t know what tomorrow’s news story will bring about Axon or any other provider,” Ellenberg said at the meeting.

Immigrant rights advocates agree.

“We keep getting told this tech is there to stop crime — to fight crime — but what happens when the definition of crime expands to include dissent?” Huy Tran, executive director of Services, Immigrant Rights and Education Network (SIREN), told San José Spotlight.

SIREN has partnered with the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California to sue San Jose police for warrantless searches of their 474 Flock cameras.

“That’s the risk we create with a mass surveillance system where the only source of protection is faith in the people who control it,” Tran said.

A spokesperson for the sheriff’s office said it made sure that no national lookup features were enabled on its Flock networks, and supervisory staff reviewed camera activity “weekly” to ensure no access by unauthorized agencies. The sheriff’s office is looking for new vendors, the spokesperson said.

“We are currently exploring alternative options and will support the cities if they choose to pursue another automated license plate reader vendor,” Sgt. Brooks Jarosz told San Jose Spotlight.

This story was originally published by San Jose Spotlight and distributed through a partnership with The Associated Press.