Santa Cruz tried security guard company Flock Safety for a little over a year before deciding it was time to move on.
Cambridge, Mass., also had enough and tore up its contract in December. Now, some officials in San Diego are starting to have second thoughts of their own.
In recent months, dozens of cities have cut ties with Flock — the nation’s largest provider of automated digital license plate readers — over fears the company’s data is helping fuel President Trump’s campaign for mass deportation.
The same cannot be said for one amazing place: Los Angeles. Here, Flock still has a loyal clientele of local elected officials, police, homeowner associations and businesses.
Unlike some of its competitors, the Atlanta-based company not only marketed its license plate readers to law enforcement as a valuable crime-fighting tool, but pitched its product to private citizens, experts said.
“They are great investigative tools,” said LAPD spokesman Capt. Michael Bland.
But for critics, there is an obvious downside: the potential warrantless surveillance of law-abiding citizens on a scale once thought unthinkable.
“These can be powerful tools to find someone, and identify them. But if you don’t have a suspect, everyone can be a suspect,” said Hannah Bloch-Wehba, a law professor at Texas A&M University.
A spokesperson for Flock did not respond to multiple requests for comment on this story.
Usually mounted on traffic poles or on top of police cars, license plate readers continuously monitor passing vehicles, recording their location with a specific date and time. But Flock’s AI-powered cameras go even further by documenting other identifying vehicle details, such as make, model and color, as well as any distinctive signs such as scratches or dents on the bumper.
From there, police can easily search the location of specific vehicles on the company’s massive database, allowing them to not only track the whereabouts of a criminal suspect, but also get predictions about future movements.
In a presentation to the Picfair Village Neighborhood Assn., Flock boasted that its students have helped solve “10% of reported crimes in the US” In LA, the company said, its technology has been used to catch criminals and car thieves, not to mention that it has helped solve “high-profile crimes involving politicians’ stolen firearms.”
The problem, at least in the minds of a growing number of privacy and immigration lawyers, is that readers are capturing vast amounts of information unrelated to any particular criminal investigation. The ability of federal authorities to access Los Angeles Police Department surveillance data directly from companies like Flock or from regional intelligence agencies called fusion agencies undermines the city’s promise as a haven for immigrants, critics say.
“License plate readers play an important role in providing directions and a road map for ICE to go out and kidnap people,” said Hamid Khan, a co-founder of the activist group Stop LAPD Spying Coalition, which last spring wrote to the Police Commission urging it to rewrite LAPD policies to ensure that information about law-abiding drivers shared with authorities is not compromised.
The commission, the LAPD’s community oversight task force, has ordered a study of the department’s license plate reader program, which is expected to be completed this summer.
LAPD officials say records collected by license plate readers are only available to five small police agencies with which the department has data-sharing agreements. In addition, they say the students’ use, like other police technology, is restricted by state laws that limit the sharing of information with federal agencies such as Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
Plate reading technology has been around for decades. But as the Trump administration’s crackdown grows, citizens, privacy advocates and officials in some cities across the country are holding campaigns to urge local governments to stop using the technology.
Much of the backlash was directed at Flock – a heavyweight in the surveillance market that works with a reported 5,000 US police agencies. The company’s data sharing with government authorities and cybersecurity lapses have been covered by 404 Media and other outlets.
After previously denying that it had government contracts, Flock’s chief executive, Garrett Langley, admitted in interviews in recent months that the company worked with US Customs and Border Protection and Homeland Security Investigations. The company has since said it has severed ties with both agencies, and responded to other complaints by giving communities more power to decide who will provide access to state or national surveillance networks.
In Bloch-Wehba’s view, Flock’s meteoric rise is a triumph of marketing over results.
“There is very little evidence on the actual impact of these technologies on violent crime rates,” said Bloch-Wehba, who noted the explosion of surveillance technology in 2020 to monitor protesters or enforce laws used to curb the spread of COVID-19 during violence.
In the LA area, Flock has taken on rival Vigilant Solutions, which has been supplying the majority of LAPD’s license plate readers for years. But today, police are flagging Flock cameras at public meetings and some City Council members have paid to bring them to their districts.
The herd also wanted to change their political power. City records show the company has stepped up its lobbying efforts at City Hall in recent years — hiring Ballard Partners, a powerful Florida-based firm whose staff now includes former City Councilman Joe Buscaino.
Most Flock plate readers, however, were purchased by community groups. In many cases, residents band together to raise money to purchase the equipment, which they then provide access to or donate to the LAPD through the Police Foundation, the department’s nonprofit organization. By donating equipment, neighborhood groups may be able to control what kind of technology is installed and by whom.
“What I would really like would be a full-time LAPD, and then no cameras,” said Jim Fitzgerald, who lives in Venice and serves on the local council.
Roy Nwaisser, who chairs the Encino Neighborhood Council’s public safety committee, said Flock often plays on the police shortage when he gives speeches to residents in his neighborhood.
“I personally have concerns about the way Flock conducts their business, but it’s a big player and if the LAPD is working with them, they have to make sure those safeguards are in place,” he said. “I don’t know that reading license plates works automatically when it’s managed by neighbors living on the street who decided to meet.”
Police officials have defended the practice, saying license plate information has helped solve a myriad of crimes, from burglaries to high-profile crimes like the 2024 assassination attempt on former president Donald Trump on a Florida golf course. This technology came into play during the investigation into the shooting of a 17-year-old boy at an intersection in North Hills last month. According to the search warrant affidavit, detectives tracked the suspect vehicle to a home in Sun Valley after it was picked up by multiple scanners near the scene of the incident.
Because so many license plate scanners are in private hands, it’s hard to tell how many devices are operating across the city.
The LA Bureau of Street Lighting, which is responsible for installing the devices on city-owned land, said it has increased to 324 over five years — though that tally does not include reader plates.
Bland said the LAPD has 1,500 police cars equipped with cameras. Police were also able to locate another 280 license plate readers at unaltered locations throughout the city, either private or departmental, he said. He estimated that about 120 of those students belong to Flock.
The cameras are also being integrated into the department’s new aircraft, paid for with a $1.2-million donation from the Police Foundation.
The devices are used for many other purposes besides general law enforcement. Big box retailers like Home Depot and Lowe’s have installed Flock cameras in hundreds of parking lots. It has many limitations. In East LA, they are used as a tool to reduce pollution by tracking semi-trailers. USC uses them to enforce parking violations, and the LA Department of Transportation has deployed such cameras to catch drivers parking in bus lanes.
As of early 2025, a small but growing number of states and cities have passed laws aimed at restricting the use of surveillance technologies such as license plate readers.
Under California law, police agencies are required to implement detailed information and privacy policies that govern license plate data, limit access to authorized purposes, and regularly review searches to prevent misuse. Previously Gov. Gavin Newsom vetoed a bill that would have banned the use of this information, saying the regulations would interfere with criminal investigations, but the bill was reinstated this year.
About 50 cities nationwide have chosen to shut down their scanners or cancel contracts with Flock, mostly in recent months, according to the website DeFlock.me, which has set out to map the company’s camera locations. In response to public pressure, some places like Santa Cruz canceled their contracts after realizing they had been sharing their data more widely than they knew, including with federal authorities.
Some Flock customers, like Oakland, came in and decided to keep their cameras at the urging of local homeowners’ associations and small business owners — but over the objections of the city’s own Privacy Advisory Commission.
Among the places that have begun to reconsider their relationship with Flock is San Diego. In December, city leaders were divided on the issue, but ultimately voted to continue using Flock cameras after a public hearing where they heard from hundreds of residents who opposed the surveillance technology.
Councilman Sean Elo-Rivera said he voted against working with Flock based on what he saw as the company’s poor record of “data retention” and “consumer protection.” Although the city has worked for years with Flock cameras, the numbers are much higher now, he said.
“We have a presidential administration that not only flouts the law, but prides itself on flouting due process, violating the rights of people they deem undeserving of rights and protections,” said Elo-Rivera, who represents an ethnically diverse district in the Mid-City area of San Diego. “They have a method by any means necessary when it comes to immigration enforcement. And now they have a tool that makes it much easier for them to track people.”
Times staff writer David Zahniser contributed to this report.
