San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie announced new restrictions last week on how police can access and share information collected by the city’s automated license plate readers, saying the changes would preserve a crime-fighting tool while addressing growing concerns about privacy and misuse.
But some of the safeguards presented as reforms have been required under California law for roughly a decade. And several recommendations from a San Francisco Human Rights Commission investigation into hundreds of instances of unauthorized data access did not make it into the mayor’s package.
Brian Hofer, executive director of the Oakland-based privacy advocacy group Secure Justice, said the announcement revisits problems privacy advocates have been raising for years without addressing what he sees as the central issue: whether anyone is ensuring the rules are followed.
“There isn’t one thing that came up in those announcements that we haven’t talked about for the last five years,” Hofer said in an interview with the San Francisco Public Press.
For Hofer, adding rules without a way to stop improper access before it happens doesn’t fundamentally change the system.
“None of these things are meaningful,” he said. “It’s all performative art.”
He characterized the response as an attempt to outlast a burst of public criticism.
“They know people have no attention span and don’t know this area, so they’re just talking, and it makes them sound important, but it’s meaningless,” he said.
The announcement comes after a year of mounting scrutiny of Flock Safety, the private company that operates San Francisco’s network of more than 400 automated license plate readers. The cameras photograph passing vehicles and record identifying information that police can search during investigations. Flock’s much larger network also allows agencies to share and search data across jurisdictions.
Hofer argues that it is precisely this ability to combine and share data that makes the technology more consequential than any single license plate scan.
“It’s this aggregation of data,” he said, noting that real-time crime centers are “literally designed to commingle different databases.”
Lurie made clear that San Francisco has no plans to abandon the technology.
“This technology keeps San Franciscans safe, and we will not go back to a time when people could break into cars, rob businesses, or commit serious crimes and expect to get away with it,” Lurie said at a Sept. 29 press conference.
Flock cameras have become an important component of the police department’s Real-Time Investigation Center, which combines automated license plate readers with drones, public safety cameras and other technology to help officers investigate crimes and locate suspects. In April 2025, police reported that the center had assisted in more than 500 arrests since its launch, including 207 involving the Flock network.
Last week, Lurie offered an updated figure, saying public-safety technology had assisted in more than 1,500 arrests over the previous two years.
Hofer said he does not dispute that surveillance technology can contribute to individual arrests. He challenged the broader suggestion that arrest totals demonstrate the technology contributed to San Francisco’s falling crime rate. His first response to such statistics, he said, is: “Prove it.”
Hofer said crime rose during the pandemic and subsequently fell across jurisdictions, regardless of whether they deployed comparable surveillance systems. This makes it difficult to attribute San Francisco’s decline to the technology.
He also questioned how agencies substantiate claims that a particular technology “assisted” in an arrest, saying he has repeatedly encountered government reports in which headline numbers were not supported when he sought the underlying records.
He brought similar skepticism to the safeguards city officials said would make that technology more accountable, questioning how much of what was announced was new.
Under the new rules, data will be removed from Flock’s platform after 30 days, rather than remaining available there for as long as a year. But Flock itself recently announced a shorter retention period than San Francisco’s new standard. In August, amid nationwide criticism, the company said it would reduce its default retention period for new law-enforcement customers from 30 days to seven.
New rules require that searches be connected to a specific incident number, officers must state a reason for each search and the system will record who conducted it.
Those safeguards, however, aren’t new.
California’s automated license plate reader law, SB 34, already required agencies operating the systems since 2016 to keep records of access to automated license plate reader data. Those records must include the date and time of access, the license plate or other data being searched, the person who accessed it and the purpose of the search.
The law also requires agencies to protect license plate data from unauthorized access and maintain written rules governing who can access it, for what purpose and when it can be shared.
“If they’re now saying they’re going to take it seriously and they actually do it, great,” Hofer said. “But that’s been the law for 10 years.”
Hofer said records he obtained from San Francisco have not contained the information contemplated by the law.
Data sharing breach
District Attorney Brooke Jenkins acknowledged that a national backlash was part of the context for the Sept. 29 announcement. Concerns about Immigration and Customs Enforcement, artificial intelligence and government use of data, she said, have created “a lot of unrest about technology.”
The goal of the new safeguards, she said, is to reassure San Franciscans “to trust us that we’re using it the right way.”
City officials said the San Francisco Police Department will review its Flock logs monthly, and the city says the Department of Police Accountability will conduct independent audits.
“San Francisco controls San Francisco’s data,” Lurie said.
But the city’s own recent audit shows that hasn’t always been the case.
A police department audit disclosed in June found that the Northern California Regional Intelligence Center had facilitated 299 searches of San Francisco’s Flock data at the request of federal or out-of-state agencies from May 2025 through May 2026.
That followed an earlier controversy involving Flock’s “Nationwide Lookup” feature. San Francisco officials said Flock had enabled the feature without the police department’s knowledge, allowing agencies outside California to search data collected by San Francisco cameras.
California law restricts sharing automated license plate reader data with federal and out-of-state agencies. The disclosure also raised questions about San Francisco’s sanctuary ordinance, which generally prohibits city employees from using city resources to assist federal immigration enforcement. If federal agencies were accessing San Francisco’s license plate data for immigration enforcement, the searches could therefore implicate the city’s sanctuary protections.
Police cut off the regional intelligence center’s access after discovering the searches. Police Chief Derrick Lew noted that his department discovered the problem itself and acted on it.
“We immediately cut off access, reported it, and let the public know what occurred,” Lew said. “The public needs to know that we are not conducting mass surveillance.”
But the episode also exposed a basic problem with relying on audits: By the time an improper search shows up in a review, the search has already happened and the information may already have been accessed.
That’s where Hofer argues the new rules fall short.
“In real time, no human is involved on the host-agency side ever for any data request,” he said. “You do not know who is going through your database. You do not know why. You do not know whether it’s within the scope of your policy or state law.”
An audit, he said, may eventually reveal an improper search, but “they are never going to notice anything in real time.”
Human Rights Commission safeguards
Lurie’s announcement came immediately after the San Francisco Human Rights Commission released the results of a 10-month investigation into whether the police department had violated the city’s sanctuary ordinance by allowing federal agencies to access its license plate data.
The commission cleared the department, finding that Flock enabled nationwide searching without police knowing about it. Whereas the sanctuary law prohibits city departments and employees from assisting federal immigration enforcement, it does not extend that prohibition to private contractors such as Flock.
But the commission also found significant oversight problems with police department policy and recommended five policy changes.
It called on the department to require a specific justification for every search and establish clearer access standards that put the department itself in direct control of Flock’s Nationwide Lookup function, enable available camera options intended to increase transparency, delete license plate data after 30 days, and regularly review Flock’s technology and settings so changes don’t happen without the department’s knowledge.
The commission also suggested the city consider other vendors, citing concerns about Flock’s representations about data sharing.
Lurie’s package adopts some of those recommendations. It includes the 30-day limit, more documentation of searches and additional reviews.
But the new policy does not put San Francisco police in direct control of Nationwide Lookup, as the commission recommended. Instead, the function is currently disabled. The package also does not fully implement the commission’s recommendation to make all available information in Flock’s public Transparency Portal accessible, including redacted search logs, the number of searches and which hotlists are active.
Asked about the backlash against Flock, Lurie avoided singling it out.
“Whatever public safety camera company that we are using, they’re going to have to abide by our public safety standards and our civil liberty standards that we’re announcing here today,” he said.
Lew, meanwhile, said the Human Rights Commission had overstepped its authority by moving beyond the question it had been asked to investigate — whether sanctuary law had been violated — and into recommendations about police policy.
Hofer’s criticism goes in the other direction. He said the investigation was too narrow because it focused on the sanctuary ordinance rather than separately examining compliance with California’s automated license plate reader law and San Francisco’s approved surveillance-use policy.
“It was just, ‘Did we violate this one provision?’” Hofer said. “It did not at all look at, ‘Did this comply with SB 34? Did this comply with the approved use policy under the surveillance ordinance?’”
A new crime for misusing data
The city’s response also includes a proposed change in state law.
Jenkins said she approached Assemblymember Matt Haney after learning about cases around the country in which police officers allegedly abused access to license plate databases.
In one case, an off-duty San Jose police officer used a personal device to search license plate reader data for the vehicle of a woman who had accused the officer’s relative of domestic violence, according to police. He then shared her location with the relative.
The officer was fired, but prosecutors did not charge him because existing California statutes governing unauthorized police database searches do not cover license plate reader data in the same way.
Jenkins and Haney want to change that.
“As I began to hear about the many situations that have gone on around this country, and most recently in San Jose, I became concerned,” Jenkins said.
She said misuse or unauthorized disclosure of license plate reader information should be criminalized “just as it is for the sharing or misuse of other law enforcement-related data.”
The proposed legislation would make unauthorized use or disclosure of automated license- plate reader data a crime and require agencies to train people with access to the systems and regularly audit their use. Haney said the legislation is still being developed and that especially egregious conduct could potentially warrant felony penalties. The earliest the bill could be introduced is December.
Jenkins characterized the proposal as an effort to act before San Francisco experiences the kinds of abuse seen elsewhere.
Hofer said that punishment after the fact addresses only part of the problem.
For meaningful oversight, he said, someone independent of the officer conducting a search would need to determine whether the underlying case is legitimate and whether the search is necessary. That would mean preserving the officer’s identity and search purpose, and conducting substantive audits, rather than relying primarily on automated controls and officers’ own explanations for their searches.
He pointed to San Diego as an example. When the city launched its Flock system in late 2023, a configuration error left its license plate reader data available for direct searches by other California law enforcement agencies. Those agencies conducted nearly 13,000 searches in about three weeks before San Diego discovered and corrected the problem.
San Diego later moved to a more restrictive system in which outside agencies had to call and justify requests before the city would release its data. Hofer said that in July 2026, outside agencies made 21 such requests.
For Hofer, the contrast shows what can happen when an officer must persuade another person that a search is warranted, rather than simply querying the database.
“They only had 21 because only 21 times did the officers actually feel it was worth it,” Hofer said. “That tells you how much just nonsense, frivolous fishing expeditions are happening.”
He also said stronger civil liability could force governments and surveillance vendors to take existing privacy rules more seriously, pointing to the potential deterrent of “really crushing class actions with big, big, big dollar numbers.”
Other cities, different approach
San Francisco’s decision to keep using Flock while tightening its rules isn’t the only response California governments have taken to the recent controversies. Some have suspended their cameras. Others have canceled contracts, restricted their use or considered bans.
Secure Justice has tracked 214 cities and counties that had dropped Flock since 2021 as of August, including 90 jurisdictions that ended their relationship with the company that month alone. Flock disputes the significance of those numbers, telling Ars Technica that new municipal partnerships in 2026 had outpaced nonrenewal by roughly 10-to-1.
Among Bay Area cities, Mountain View unanimously terminated its Flock contract in February after discovering that hundreds of agencies that had not been approved by the city had searched its license plate data.
Santa Cruz and Los Altos Hills also ended their Flock contracts, while Santa Clara County adopted a policy barring its sheriff from contracting with Flock for license plate reader cameras.
Richmond temporarily shut down its Flock cameras after discovering that a national-sharing feature had exposed its data. It later restored them with additional safeguards and is now considering replacing Flock with another vendor.
Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass went further in August, calling for the Los Angeles Police Department to stop using Flock altogether and saying the company had lost the public’s trust.
