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The Mountain View City Council unanimously voted on Tuesday to terminate its license plate camera contract with Flock Safety, heeding the calls of dozens of impassioned residents who spoke at the meeting urging the city to cut ties with the surveillance technology company.
Police Chief Mike Canfield disclosed last month that unauthorized law enforcement agencies had searched the city’s license plate data for more than a year. With Tuesday’s vote, Mountain View joins a handful of other cities nationwide that also have recently cut ties with the company citing privacy and data security concerns, including Santa Cruz and Los Altos Hills.
“History reminds us what can happen when civil liberties are overridden and when safeguards fail,” Council member Ellen Kamei said at the Feb. 24 meeting. “It’s incumbent on all of us City Council members to be vigilant in protecting both our public safety but also our civil rights.”
The city’s decision to terminate its contract with Flock Safety follows a Voice investigation which revealed that data from the city’s automatic license plate readers, or ALPRs, was searchable by agencies across California. This was in violation of a city policy requiring the police to approve departments individually. The Voice found that over 250 unapproved agencies had conducted roughly 600,000 searches of the city’s records from December 2024 through December 2025. That access was only turned off after it was discovered last month.
There also was a three-month period in late 2024 during which out-of-state agencies could tap into the city’s ALPR data. At the time, only one camera had been installed in Mountain View. Canfield acknowledged in a report to the council that this was in violation of city policy and state law, which prohibits the sharing of ALPR data with out-of-state agencies, including for immigration enforcement purposes.
“To be very clear, we did not know this was going on,” Canfield told the City Council on Tuesday. “We had not set it up, and we were surprised to learn of it.”
Amid intense public scrutiny, the police department announced on Feb. 2 that it would disable all Flock Safety cameras until further direction was provided by the City Council at its Feb. 24 meeting.
Flock spokesperson Paris Lewbel told the Voice that the company is working to continuously improve its system and hopes to work with Mountain View again in the future, noting that Flock continues to serve almost 350 California cities. Flock has also changed its platform in California to block out-of-state searches, Lewbel added.
“We’re proud of the important work we’ve done in partnership with the Mountain View Police Department and the impact Flock cameras have had in investigating burglaries, home break-ins, and a reported kidnapping, while enhancing community safety,” Lewbel said in an email.
Council members weigh in on ALPR program
On Tuesday, council members supported a formal recommendation from Canfield to terminate the city’s contract with Flock Safety. They urged the police department to take down the cameras as quickly as possible with a few council members also clarifying that they did not have any interest in pursuing other iterations of an ALPR program.
“It is suffocating, how terrifying it is for our community now,” Mayor Emily Ann Ramos said, referring to heightened fears of federal immigration enforcement under the Trump administration. “I hope we can find a way to get those cameras out.”
The City Council approved the implementation of an ALPR pilot program two years ago, selecting Flock Safety as the vendor. The first camera was put up in Mountain View in August 2024, and the final one was installed last month, bringing the total number up to 30. The cameras capture license plate numbers and other identifying information from the back of passing vehicles. The data is then cross-checked with a “hot list” of vehicles potentially associated with crimes, providing real time alerts to law enforcement agencies.
According to Capt. Evan Crowl, the Flock cameras provided Mountain View police with “actionable leads,” including in investigations of commercial burglaries, home and vehicle break-ins, a mail theft ring, missing persons and kidnapping.
Community members speak out against Flock cameras
Public speakers, however, lined up in droves to denounce Flock Safety and its data sharing breaches. They also objected to the idea that ALPR technology is a beneficial public safety tool.
“Mass surveillance does not keep our public safe,” Mountain View resident Tim MacKenzie said. “No guardrails can prohibit any ALPR vendor from violating our fundamental constitutional rights to privacy.”
Mountain View resident George Duque also stressed the importance of the city terminating its contract with Flock Safety. He said he fled Colombia to the U.S. with his mom and sister 35 years ago. Since then, he has built a life in Mountain View.
“I can’t imagine how I would have felt knowing that I was being watched, knowing that ICE was coming after people like my family,” Duque said, with his two kids in the audience.
Several commentators questioned whether all of the Flock cameras have been deactivated, stressing that it could be difficult to physically remove them since the cameras are not owned by the city, but rather leased from Flock.
Seeking to reassure the public, Crowl noted that the police department had reached out to Flock Safety to ensure that the cameras were turned off and not collecting data. “We were assured that there’s no data being captured,” he said.
Canfield added that the city was exploring the possibility of taking down the cameras itself to expedite the removal process, or using an outside vendor to do it.
On the whole, council members strongly supported the staff recommendation to end the city’s contract with Flock Safety and get rid of the ALPR cameras. However, there was some discussion about potentially allowing the police department to “query” Flock’s database to assist with investigations, without having cameras in Mountain View that would contribute data to the system.
Council member Chris Clark broached the topic, which was shut down by colleagues who expressed discomfort with the idea of severing a contract with Flock while simultaneously maintaining a relationship with the company.
Council member Alison Hicks also noted that it could complicate the city’s efforts to seek reimbursement from Flock Safety, which the city has paid $154,650 thus far, according to the staff report.
Looking to cut ties with Flock Safety completely, Council member Pat Showalter added that the cost of the program was not just about money.
“We don’t want to spend $100,000 on something that we shouldn’t spend it on,” she said. “But what’s the real cost? [It’s] the cost to our civil liberties.”
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Im a big fan of flock. Helped solved my neighbors burglary and helped the city catch a hit in run that hospitalized a city employee.
There’s a way to do this without giving away the store. I’m hoping a more palatable vendor comes up. But for now if flock wants to run their business this way (using little cities to serve as the eyes and ears for the feds), that’s their problem.