The Richmond City Council voted Tuesday to extend its contract with Flock Safety for its automated license plate reader cameras until the end of the year while the city administration explores alternative vendors.

Police departments use automated license plate reader (ALPR) cameras to investigate crimes like stolen vehicles. But privacy watchdogs have raised concerns about federal agencies being able to access the camera data — a potential violation of state law — and using it for targeted surveillance of immigrants and other vulnerable groups. 

Over the last few months, many Bay Area cities and counties have been re-examining their contracts with Flock Safety, considering the federal administration’s crackdown on immigrants, and the company’s checkered record with regard to sharing ALPR data with federal agencies like U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and U.S. Customs and Border Protection. 

In Richmond, the police department was proposing that the council extend its contract with Flock Safety until the end of 2026, while the department looked for alternative vendors. 

The city’s previous contract with Flock Safety expired on Feb. 28, but the cameras have been disabled since October, when the police department found out about a potential data breach.

In October, the Richmond Police Department discovered that federal agencies had access to the data collected through a back-end “National Lookup” feature enabled by Flock Safety. 

“We cannot be trusting a company that tricked you and was not upfront.”

Councilmember Claudia Jimenez

Noting that this was inconsistent with the city and state law, Chief of Police Timothy Simmons directed that the city’s ALPR cameras be disabled, and they have remained disabled ever since.

While the camera data was accessible to federal agencies, Simmons said on Tuesday that he had no evidence to suggest that any of Richmond’s ALPR data was accessed by an outside agency.

He stressed that while he was upset at Flock’s lack of transparency about the National Lookup feature, the ALPR cameras are an essential tool for his department. Flock Safety has since disabled its National Lookup feature, he said.

According to a staff report submitted to the council, the Richmond Police Department owns 96 ALPR cameras and 65 Pan-Tilt-Zoom (PTZ) cameras manufactured by Flock Safety. The PTZ cameras cannot read license plates but are used in conjunction with ALPR cameras in investigations. 

Since 2023, the cameras have helped make 274 arrests and recover 259 stolen vehicles, and vehicle theft has increased by 33% after the ALPR cameras were disabled last year, according to police.

Simmons also described to the councilmembers some of the 51 open cases since October — many of them violent felonies — that the ALPR cameras could have helped investigate if they were turned on.   

“These are the real victims and cases where we really are trying to bring closure for injustice, for people who are forever changed,” Simmons said. 

Broader pushback on surveillance tech

But Mayor Eduardo Martinez and Councilmembers Sue Wilson and Claudia Jimenez said that the company cannot be trusted after its indiscretions were revealed in October.

In the last three months, the city councils of Santa Cruz, Mountain View, and Los Altos Hills terminated their respective contracts with Flock Safety, citing privacy concerns, and the Santa Clara County Board of Supervisors also voted to adopt a new surveillance use policy that prohibits the county Sheriff’s Office from contracting with Flock Safety as a vendor for ALPR cameras. 

“We cannot be trusting a company that tricked you and was not upfront,” said Jimenez to Simmons. “Safety of our community is in not contracting with Flock.”

But others, like Councilmember Jamelia Brown, questioned whether it was prudent to do away with a vital law enforcement tool while the police department is understaffed. 

“I want to emphasize that public safety is immigrant safety, and protecting one community while leaving others vulnerable is not public safety, it’s negligence,” she said. “I don’t believe [that] who the vendor is should dictate public safety.”

In the end, the council voted 4-3 in favor of extending the contract, with instructions to the city staff to bake in stronger guardrails to prevent any data sharing with outside agencies.