In June of 2026, Visalia Police Department decided they no longer wanted the public to know why they were accessing the Flock Automated License Plate Reader system.
Let’s look at Visalia PD’s “Transparency Page” .CSV file for two different 30 day periods this year. Here’s the one starting on May 5, 2026, which contains the “reason” field in the log.
From the left to the right, we see the following ; an ID number, apparently coded. The “user ID” is merely asterisks. No public idea who is accessing the data. Next is the date and time, in “Zulu” time, which is UTC, which is Greenwich Mean Time. (London, England) Next is the number of “networks” being searched. I don’t know if this means number of cameras, or number of agencies, businesses, and organizations. The final field is “reason”. Each search of the database requires a reason for the search. They’ve told us each access requires a case number, but it’s never been listed on the public facing page. As it is, some of the “reason” entries are simply meaningless. More on that in a bit.
Now, starting sometime in June of 2026, VPD has removed the “reason” field from the file. I’m going to assume it’s visible on their side of the site (all of this stuff sits on Flock servers, requiring users to log in and access the information remotely), but we can no longer see it. Our “transparency” is becoming more opaque.
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