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All of Mountain View’s license plate cameras are being disabled, effective immediately, Police Chief Mike Canfield announced Monday afternoon. The move comes in the wake of the police department’s disclosure last week that hundreds of law enforcement agencies had accessed the sensitive data in violation of the city’s policies for over a year.
The cameras will remain turned off until further direction is provided by the Mountain View City Council, which is expected to discuss the future of the program at its Feb. 24 meeting, Canfield wrote in the Feb. 2 news release.
The announcement follows a Voice investigation which revealed that more than 250 California law enforcement agencies had searched the city’s license plate camera data without its authorization or knowledge. That access was only turned off last month.
There was also a three month period in late-2024 when agencies outside of California were able to search Mountain View’s data, including multiple federal entities.
The cameras, 30 in total, were installed and administered by Flock Safety, a surveillance technology company. The automatic license plate readers – known as ALPRs – automatically take photos of the back of passing vehicles.
“While the Flock Safety pilot program demonstrated clear value in enhancing our ability to protect our community and help us solve crimes, I personally no longer have confidence in this particular vendor,” Canfield said in the release. “I was deeply disappointed to learn that Flock Safety did not meet the City’s requirements regarding our data access control and transparency.”
Following a public records request from the Voice, the police department recently discovered that a “national lookup” setting had been turned on from August to November 2024. According to Canfield, Flock turned that setting on without notifying Mountain View police, and did not tell the department when it was turned off.
The department also realized that a “statewide lookup” function had allowed agencies throughout California to search the city’s data since the first camera was installed in August 2024.
Under city policy, agencies are only supposed to be given access to Mountain View’s data if they receive prior authorization from the police department. State law also prohibits sharing ALPR information with out-of-state agencies, as well as sharing this information for immigration enforcement purposes.
“This vendor’s lack of proactive disclosure is inconsistent with the standards the MVPD holds and the assurances we were given by the Flock team,” Canfield said. “I, in turn, gave assurances to the community that I now know were not grounded in the Flock system’s actual practice.”
Canfield added that community trust is vital to public safety and is a reason for discontinuing the ALPR pilot program until the City Council can weigh in on it.
Last week, a Flock spokesperson said that the company would confer with the Mountain View Police Department directly to address its concerns.
This is a developing story and more information will be included with updates.
Thank you to Emily, Zoe and the Mountain View Voice for breaking this important story. It’s a reminder of why local journalism is so important to the health of our community.
This is the responsible thing to do. Thanks to MVPD for taking action proactively.
So it looks like Flock turned this on by themselves? Can’t I’m shocked by this behavior. It is absolutely the responsibility of our city to know what they are buying, how it is and can be used, and what they are getting themselves into. If they don’t know the features of a product, they shouldn’t be using it. By the way, wow much is this costing MV? We should get all of OUR money back, if not suing Flock for breach of contract. The police found out about this 1/5/26 (in the first article mentioned here) and we are just finding out about it now?
“Mountain View Police Department plans to present a review of the ALPR pilot program to the City Council” (from the last article) and
“Canfield added that community trust is vital to public safety and is a reason for discontinuing the ALPR pilot program until the City Council can weigh in on it.” (From this article.) Police Chief Canfield is right, trust is monumental, and it will never be regained as long as these are still in our city. I hope that the City Council is not bullied into turning these back on. The Police Department has shown that they do not have control over their processes and can no longer be trusted on this issue. The ALPRs need to be dismantled and taken away, immediately.
Thank you Mountain View Voice for digging in to this, we might not have ever found out otherwise.
Eeks, sorry for the typos. I proofread it but was still so incensed by this breach that some got through 🙁
Police Chief Mike Canfield – thank you for taking the initial step of turning off Flock cameras (at least until the 2/24/26 City Council meeting).
However, experience from other jurisdictions shows that disabling Flock cameras is not always as simple as changing a setting in a user interface. In several cases, police departments have reported that cameras were reactivated or reinstalled without their authorization.
Two recent examples illustrate this risk:
• December 2025 – Eugene, Oregon. Flock cameras were reportedly reactivated after being disabled by the police department.
https://lookouteugene-springfield.com/story/latest-news/2025/12/09/flock-activated-camera-during-pause-chief-says-pushing-city-to-axe-contract/
• September 2025 – Evanston, Illinois. The city removed Flock cameras that were found to be in violation of state privacy laws. Flock subsequently reinstalled the cameras without the city’s permission.
https://evanstonroundtable.com/2025/09/24/flock-safety-reinstalls-evanston-cameras/
Given these precedents, simply assuring the public that Flock cameras have been disabled is insufficient. The department should independently verify—and be prepared to demonstrate—that the cameras are fully offline, not collecting data, and not transmitting information in any form.
Thank you, Mountain View Voice, for continuing to report on this issue of public importance.
Great decision on the part of MVPD. Flock doesn’t require warrants or any other meaningful controls to ensure data is used in lawful ways. There have been several national stories about abuses and recently questions about how ICE uses the data. We should have no part in that. “Think globally, act locally.”