The devil’s in the details, as they say, and boy are there some details here! Let’s take a look.
428.3 “…to convert data associated with vehicle license plates for official law enforcement purposes, including identifying stolen or wanted vehicles, stolen license plates and missing persons. It may also be used to gather information related to active warrants, homeland security, electronic surveillance, suspect interdiction and stolen property recovery.”
“Homeland Security”. California law prohibits the release of ALPR data generated in California to Federal agencies.
California Civil Code § 1798.90.51: Mandates that an ALPR operator or end-user must not share ALPR data with agencies or entities that are not state or local law enforcement agencies operating strictly under California state law.
California Civil Code § 1798.90.55: Prohibits public agencies from selling, sharing, or transferring ALPR information, limiting valid dissemination solely to authorized local/state public agencies operating within California for defined law enforcement purposes.
As long as they’re operating only based on California law, and not in conjunction with any Federal or out-of-state agency, they could, theoretically, use ALPR data for a perceived “homeland security” threat. But if they call in the Feds, they can’t give any of the ALPR data that they developed from their investigation to them.
Here’s the real devil, in my opinion, though:
428.7
(a) The agency makes a written request for the ALPR data that includes:
The name of the agency.
The name of the person requesting.
The intended purpose of obtaining the information.
(b) The request is reviewed by the Operations Support Division Captain or the authorized designee and approved before the request is fulfilled.
(c) The approved request is retained on file.
On 9/6/2026, there were 258 agencies listed on the Visalia Police Department’s Flock Transparency page as “Sharing Network Data With – Organizations granted access to Visalia CA PD data.”
From May 1, 2026 through June 1, 2026, there were 507,696 “hits” on Visalia PD’s Flock data set. California Highway Patrol was the biggest user, with 46,693 inquiries. That’s just one month’s worth of data access. (Visalia PD accessed the data only 1,634 times in that month, for comparison.)
Somehow, I doubt Visalia Police Department received 507,696 written requests for information which included the name of the agency, the requesting officer’s name, and the purpose for obtaining the information, which was then processed and approved before the data was released.
Now, I’m not a lawyer. I’ve never played one on TV. Hell, I didn’t even stay in a Holiday Inn Express last night. But it seems to me that the rule book isn’t being followed. The data is being accessed randomly by any agency on the “granted” list unsupervised. None of the required review or approvals are being done. Visalia PD has simply opened it’s data to anyone on that list. (To be sure, it’s a pretty common way to operate, as far as I can determine, statewide. Agencies all over the state are allowing the same access. The policy manual is one that is from a template, used by many agencies, and modified to reflect Visalia-specific regulation. One wonders how well it’s read before operations begin.)
I’m not universally against license plate reader systems. They have legitimate uses in the law enforcement world. What I don’t like is agencies, and especially the Visalia Police Department, giving control of these systems to an outside organization. The data is taken by cameras not owned by Visalia, the data is stored on servers not under the physical control of Visalia, and the programs used to access that data are proprietary property of Flock. The only real security on the data is Flock saying, “trust us, bro”. News reports the past few years tell us we can’t.
There are plenty of other ‘devils’ playing in this ongoing drama with Flock. Their use of the data, regardless of their claims that the customers own and control it and they won’t sell it, even though there are three places in the contract where the following is stated: “Customer hereby grants Flock a non-exclusive, worldwide, perpetual, royalty-free right to use and distribute such Anonymized Data to improve and enhance the Services and for other development, diagnostic and corrective purposes, and other Flock offerings.”
They also will use the data, anonymized (whatever that means. How do you anonymize data but still do this) to teach their AI program: “including the training of machine learning algorithms.”
Automated License Plate Readers are the camel’s nose. The rest of the camel is all the things they will (not can, will) do with the data we pay them to collect. The nose is in the tent. Maybe the camel has his entire head inside.
Did you ever watch the TV show, “Person of Interest”? Mr. Finch was trying to create an AI that could hunt terrorists. He succeeded. A joke of the show was that before he could create that machine, he had to create the availability of data, so he created social media. Now everyone provided the data he needed to train his AI. If you followed the show, you know how well all of that turned out.
We have some decisions to make. And some decisions already made to overturn. At the very least, change the policy manual to reflect how things are actually done.
Or we can just trust the government to always do the right thing, and protect us from bad actors. We’ve seen how well that’s worked out in the past, haven’t we?
Random thoughts, occasional rants, illuminating commentary, and an odd story now and then from the world of 9-1-1 dispatching. All this and more from a gay liberal atheist living in California’s Bible belt. I recently married, so MAGA beware! I’m your worst nightmare! Some names have been omitted to protect the innocent, but the guilty will be hung out to dry!
Is Visalia PD following it’s own License Plate Reader policy regarding Flock cameras?
September 6, 2026
Jim Reeves commentary, geek, News ai, ALPR, Flock, Flock Camera, Flock License Plate Reader, License Plate Reader, News, tchnology, visalia, visalia police department, VPD Leave a comment
The Visalia Police Department Policy manual includes the following section (online as of 5 pm Pacific, 9/6/2026):
The devil’s in the details, as they say, and boy are there some details here! Let’s take a look.
428.3
“…to convert data associated with vehicle license plates for official law enforcement purposes, including identifying stolen or wanted vehicles, stolen license plates and missing persons. It may also be used to gather information related to active warrants, homeland security, electronic surveillance, suspect interdiction and stolen property recovery.”
“Homeland Security”. California law prohibits the release of ALPR data generated in California to Federal agencies.
California Civil Code § 1798.90.51: Mandates that an ALPR operator or end-user must not share ALPR data with agencies or entities that are not state or local law enforcement agencies operating strictly under California state law.
California Civil Code § 1798.90.55: Prohibits public agencies from selling, sharing, or transferring ALPR information, limiting valid dissemination solely to authorized local/state public agencies operating within California for defined law enforcement purposes.
As long as they’re operating only based on California law, and not in conjunction with any Federal or out-of-state agency, they could, theoretically, use ALPR data for a perceived “homeland security” threat. But if they call in the Feds, they can’t give any of the ALPR data that they developed from their investigation to them.
Here’s the real devil, in my opinion, though:
428.7
(a) The agency makes a written request for the ALPR data that includes:
(b) The request is reviewed by the Operations Support Division Captain or the authorized
designee and approved before the request is fulfilled.
(c) The approved request is retained on file.
On 9/6/2026, there were 258 agencies listed on the Visalia Police Department’s Flock Transparency page as “Sharing Network Data With – Organizations granted access to Visalia CA PD data.”
From May 1, 2026 through June 1, 2026, there were 507,696 “hits” on Visalia PD’s Flock data set. California Highway Patrol was the biggest user, with 46,693 inquiries. That’s just one month’s worth of data access. (Visalia PD accessed the data only 1,634 times in that month, for comparison.)
Somehow, I doubt Visalia Police Department received 507,696 written requests for information which included the name of the agency, the requesting officer’s name, and the purpose for obtaining the information, which was then processed and approved before the data was released.
Now, I’m not a lawyer. I’ve never played one on TV. Hell, I didn’t even stay in a Holiday Inn Express last night. But it seems to me that the rule book isn’t being followed. The data is being accessed randomly by any agency on the “granted” list unsupervised. None of the required review or approvals are being done. Visalia PD has simply opened it’s data to anyone on that list. (To be sure, it’s a pretty common way to operate, as far as I can determine, statewide. Agencies all over the state are allowing the same access. The policy manual is one that is from a template, used by many agencies, and modified to reflect Visalia-specific regulation. One wonders how well it’s read before operations begin.)
I’m not universally against license plate reader systems. They have legitimate uses in the law enforcement world. What I don’t like is agencies, and especially the Visalia Police Department, giving control of these systems to an outside organization. The data is taken by cameras not owned by Visalia, the data is stored on servers not under the physical control of Visalia, and the programs used to access that data are proprietary property of Flock. The only real security on the data is Flock saying, “trust us, bro”. News reports the past few years tell us we can’t.
There are plenty of other ‘devils’ playing in this ongoing drama with Flock. Their use of the data, regardless of their claims that the customers own and control it and they won’t sell it, even though there are three places in the contract where the following is stated: “Customer hereby grants Flock a non-exclusive, worldwide, perpetual, royalty-free right to use and distribute such Anonymized Data to improve and enhance the Services and for other development, diagnostic and corrective purposes, and other Flock offerings.”
They also will use the data, anonymized (whatever that means. How do you anonymize data but still do this) to teach their AI program: “including the training of machine learning algorithms.”
Automated License Plate Readers are the camel’s nose. The rest of the camel is all the things they will (not can, will) do with the data we pay them to collect. The nose is in the tent. Maybe the camel has his entire head inside.
Did you ever watch the TV show, “Person of Interest”? Mr. Finch was trying to create an AI that could hunt terrorists. He succeeded. A joke of the show was that before he could create that machine, he had to create the availability of data, so he created social media. Now everyone provided the data he needed to train his AI. If you followed the show, you know how well all of that turned out.
We have some decisions to make. And some decisions already made to overturn. At the very least, change the policy manual to reflect how things are actually done.
Or we can just trust the government to always do the right thing, and protect us from bad actors. We’ve seen how well that’s worked out in the past, haven’t we?
My previous Flock-related posts:
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