|
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
|
In the wake of intense public scrutiny, Mountain View’s police chief is advising the City Council to cut ties with Flock Safety, a surveillance technology company, after discovering that unauthorized agencies had access to sensitive information captured by the city’s automatic license plate cameras for more than a year.
The City Council is expected to vote on terminating the city’s contract with Flock Safety at a Tuesday, Feb. 24, meeting. If the police department’s recommendation is approved, Mountain View would no longer use Flock Safety as its vendor for automatic license plate readers, known as ALPRs.
The formal proposal to end the agreement with Flock became public when the agenda for next week’s meeting was published Thursday afternoon. It includes a report to council members from Police Chief Mike Canfield and Captain Evan Crowl advising them to terminate the contract. It is unclear from that report whether city officials want to reinstate ALPR cameras with a different vendor in the future.
Canfield’s recommendation to terminate the contract with Flock Safety follows a recent Voice investigation which revealed that hundreds of California law enforcement agencies had been able to search the police department’s license plate camera data without its knowledge or authorization. That access was turned off last month.
There also was a three-month period in late 2024 during which out-of-state agencies could search the city’s ALPR data, including federal entities. Canfield acknowledged in the council report that this was in violation of city policy and state law, which prohibits the sharing of ALPR data with out-of-state agencies.
Three days after the Voice’s investigation was published, the police department announced on Feb. 2 that it would be immediately disabling all of its license plate cameras, pending further direction from the City Council. That direction is expected to come at Tuesday’s meeting.
The council report cites the security and privacy lapses as reasons to terminate the city’s contract with Flock Safety, as well as a desire from the police department to reestablish transparency and trust with the community.
“It was a significant blow to learn that the department had inadvertently fallen short of ensuring the protections promised in response to community concerns about data privacy and the potential misuse of Flock Safety data by federal and other external agencies,” the report said.
But while looking to cut ties with Flock Safety, the council report also describes the value of ALPRs in police investigations.
Setting up Mountain View’s ALPR program
Two years ago, the City Council approved a contract with Flock Safety to install 24 ALPRs in various locations throughout the city, with the expectation that the pilot program would be reviewed after a year. The agreement also allowed for more cameras to be added if needed, with approval from the city manager or her designee.
ALPRs automatically take photos of the back of passing vehicles, recording license plate numbers and other identifying information like vehicles’ makes and models. The data is then cross-checked with a “hot list” of vehicles potentially associated with crimes, providing real time alerts to law enforcement agencies.
“Such systems allow investigators to turn incomplete descriptions of vehicles of interest, such as partial plates, vehicle color or vehicle type, into actionable investigative leads,” the council report said, adding that this was not possible to do through traditional law enforcement databases.
However, the installation of the Flock cameras ran into obstacles from the start. The first camera went up in August 2024. It then took six months for the second camera to be installed, with the city steadily adding more, bringing the total up to 30 when the final camera was installed last month. The city has paid Flock Safety $154,650 but may seek partial reimbursement, according to the council report.
The delay in putting up the cameras pushed out the review of the pilot program. The police department planned to present its findings to the City Council this May. It would have included a review of the effectiveness of the ALPR program as a public safety tool, including its compliance with the police department’s policies and procedures, according to the council report.
Although the one-year review did not happen before the cameras were disabled this month, the council report states that regular audits still occurred to ensure that Mountain View police officers complied with the city’s ALPR policies and procedures.
The report also states that the police department had been auditing external access to its data at “random intervals,” but that these reviews did not reveal any evidence of violations of city policy. The report does not explain why the searches by unauthorized agencies were not discovered during these audits.
City discovers breaches of policies
It was only when the police department conducted a “network” audit that it discovered searches of the city’s ALPR data had been carried out by unauthorized agencies, according to the council report. The report does not specify when the police department initiated this network audit, although Canfield previously said that it occurred after the Voice submitted a public records request for ALPR search records last summer.
It was from the network audit that the police department realized the ALPR system had not been set up as intended, according to the council report. “National” and “statewide” lookup features had been enabled without the police department knowing about it.
“At no time during the implementation calls, meetings, tutorial, onboarding or related presentations was a statewide or nationwide lookup tool discussed, demonstrated or presented to MVPD as a configurable feature,” the council report said.
The report also notes that the lookup features could be activated and deactivated with a “single click” on the system’s administrative interface. However, Flock representatives could not tell the police department how these settings were enabled, as the relevant logs did not exist at the time the cameras were installed, the report said.
Flock also could not tell the police department how the national lookup feature had been disabled, which occurred sometime in November 2024. It is unknown whether any of Mountain View’s ALPR data was obtained through searches by federal entities during that time, as that auditing function also did not exist, according to the council report.
What’s next for Mountain View’s ALPR program?
While recommending termination of the city’s contract with Flock, the council report also lays out “lessons learned” from the pilot program, suggesting that other iterations of an ALPR program could be possible in the future.
Some of the lessons learned include assigning a dedicated system auditor or program specialist before implementing complex technological systems, as well as making sure that all features, including permission structures, audit logs and configuration controls, are validated and align with city policies and expectations.
The report also describes the importance of auditing external access early on and having structured protocols to proactively seek out potential misuse, policy deviations and setting misconfigurations.
The council report concludes by saying the city “will continue to monitor and assess the availability, value, effectiveness and appropriateness of existing and emerging tools and practices” to support police work.
The council meeting will start at 6:30 p.m. Tuesday, Feb. 24, at Mountain View City Hall, 500 Castro St. The agenda is available online.
Thanks to the MVPD for figuring this out. How do we know how our data were used, if at all? Personally, I don’t want my comings and goings shared with other agencies.
Most of the property crimes in Mountain View are from non-residents (source Chief Canfield)
So we would benefit from finding some other way catch criminals. I hope they find something else. Flock can’t be the only game in town.
Thank you MV Voice for following up on this issue, and thank you to Police Chief Canfield for looking into this to protect our privacy, especially during this era of government overreach.
I’d like to know how much “value of ALPRs in police investigations” we have received.
Thank you Chief Canfield and ~especially~ thanks again to the Voice for first bringing this up and also continuing to report on it.
And oh yes, there are definitely other companies in this field. Whether they are more scrupulous or not, I cannot say.
Yes @Waverly, I would also like to know the “value of ALPRs in police investigations.” For $154,650, I hope it’s a LOT. I would like the Police Department to show us the data that support that conclusion and cost.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation just had a webinar on the subject of ALPRs:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E5PwyAd54rI
Thank you, Mountain View Voice! We would never have known about this breach of trust if it weren’t for your diligence. Yet again, our small local paper consistently uncovers truths that larger, better-funded media organizations simply choose to ignore.
It is difficult to believe that this feature was “accidentally” enabled, because unnamed “other agencies” somehow knew they could search our records. The MVPD should let us know exactly who knew this feature was enabled and who told them it was available. Before the city invests in any technology, it would be prudent to not just look at the technical merits, but also who is behind the vendor. The involvement of investors like Andreessen Horowitz and Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund in Flock Safety should have raised eyebrows, considering their myriad other investments in shadowy surveillance technologies.
Thanks again to the Mountain View Voice for shining a public light on these breaches. Fully support severing any ties with that now untrusted vendor.
Thank you MV Voice! Take the cameras down. We don’t need a surveillance state. Thinking a different vendor will be more trustworthy is wishful thinking.
If you want to understand the true value of the Flock Safety system, talk to a cold case homicide detective. Ask them about the “ones that got away”—the cases where a killer vanished into the night simply because they crossed a city line or turned a corner where no one was looking.
For decades, investigators have wished for a “Google search” for crime. Today, we finally have it and a police chief that doesn’t want to highlight the benefits finds it easier to blame the vendor then look at his staff that was responsible for understanding the system in the first place. Yes, it is that simple.
When law enforcement uses Flock, they aren’t “watching” a street corner to monitor law-abiding residents. They are querying a digital history book to find a specific “fingerprint”—a car’s color, make, model, or even a unique bumper sticker. The keyword here is criminal. Unless you are causing notice by being associated with a crime, you aren’t being tracked. But for a detective, this “history book” is the difference between a case going cold and a closed one.
We are seeing this play out in real-time across our region:
The Sunnyvale Arrest: On February 16, a suspect committed a felony assault with a firearm and fled. The very next day, a Flock alert spotted the vehicle in Los Gatos. A multi-agency effort involving Sunnyvale, Los Gatos, and Santa Clara County Specialized Enforcement Team led to a safe arrest and the recovery of a loaded firearm with an extended magazine. Source: Sunnyvale Public Safety Officers Association.
The Pleasanton Double Homicide: February 19th: In San Jose, officers identified a vehicle linked to a double homicide thirty miles away. Because crime doesn’t stop at city boundaries, this technology allowed agencies to work together to take a killer off the streets before he could strike again. Source: San Jose Police Department, KRON, Pleasanton Police Department, Mercury News.
Discarding such an effective tool due to the administrative challenges recently seen in Mountain View is a missed opportunity. Rather than addressing a lack of technical oversight or internal auditing failures, it appears officials are shifting accountability to the vendor to obscure their own procedural gaps.
Cold case investigators of the past would have given anything for this level of inter-agency collaboration. We shouldn’t punish public safety today because of bureaucratic oversight. Let’s put competent people in charge of the technology and keep the focus where it belongs: on the victims who deserve justice and the communities that deserve to be safe.
As a long time resident, I do recall Journalist DeBolt’s coverage of a Mountain View case (Google it): The 2008 shooting death of Jeffrey Johnson is a prime example of a case where Flock Safety technology could have provided the objective evidence needed to overcome the “wall of silence” that ultimately stalled the investigation. While authorities had a “decent idea” of who was involved, the case fell apart because they couldn’t prove their presence beyond a reasonable doubt without the cooperation of fearful witnesses. Had Flock’s ALPR cameras been in place at the Happi House parking lot or along the flight path through Old Mountain View, investigators would have had immediate, indisputable records of the suspects’ license plates and vehicle descriptions. Instead of relying on the “passage of time” for a teenager’s conscience to clear, police could have used real-time digital footprints to corroborate their leads, identify the vehicle involved in the secondary shooting, and provide the District Attorney with the technical evidence required to secure a conviction—long before the trail went cold. – Are you thinking a little bigger now?
The technology is more useful locally than a federal or out of state use: There are no federal operations or “dragnets” targeting the general population of Mountain View. Federal agencies (such as the FBI, US Marshals, or DHS) do not conduct city-wide searches of FLOCK without a specific, high-level criminal target. Federal agencies operating in the Bay Area focus almost exclusively on violent fugitives or transnational criminal organizations.
Dear The Tool Cold Case Investigators Only Dreamed Of,
If you believe Flock Safety is truly on the side of regular Americans, you should watch the EFF webinar linked by “Your Neighbor” above to see the reality of this industry. Much like the healthcare and pharmaceutical giants that claim to care about us while bankrupting countless families, or a defense industry that excels at starting wars (but never winning them) just to keep taxpayer funds flowing, this is about enrichment, not service. These cameras won’t reduce crime; they are simply the latest scheme to drain our taxes and funnel all wealth to the Epstein class.