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The consulting firm Baker Tilly, which serves as Palo Alto’s City Auditor, is recusing itself from a proposed audit of Flock Safety license plate cameras due to a conflict of interest, leaving city staff scrambling to find an alternative firm able to do the work before the City Council goes on its summer recess.
The audit was brought forward as an item to the Policy and Services Committee on Tuesday night as reports of sensitive data sharing have cropped up throughout Silicon Valley and nationwide. Flock operates 30 automatic license plate readers (ALPRs) in Palo Alto as a crime prevention and investigation tool to help local law enforcement, but concerns about who is able to access that data have persisted for years throughout the community.
In neighboring Mountain View, police officers revealed in January that hundreds of law enforcement agents were granted unauthorized access to the city’s license plate data. Amid the Trump administration’s crackdown on immigration and abortion access, city officials promptly turned off all the ALPRs and weeks later terminated its contract with Flock. State law also prohibits sharing ALPR information with out-of-state agencies as well as the sharing of this information for immigration enforcement purposes.
The independent audit proposed for Palo Alto would assess Flock’s systems for “appropriate policies, procedures and controls to ensure City information and data is secure and confidential,” according to city staff. But because Baker Tilly also provides services to Flock, the consulting firm recused itself from conducting the audit in a last-minute memo to the committee.
Initially, the city was planning to negotiate a waiver with Flock to ensure that the assignment does not present a conflict of interest for Baker Tilly. But upon further consideration, the firm concluded that it is “appropriate for the firm to recuse itself from this assessment to avoid any potential appearance or concern that this might impair our independence and/or compromise our ability to effectively conduct this assessment with the full confidence of the public’s trust,” the memo stated.
“As the city and the vendor coordinate to set the scope for the assessment, we can assist as needed by recommending specific firms that would be able to conduct this work,” City Auditor Kate Murdock told the committee. “Baker Tilly will also commit the previously identified funds for the proposed assessment from the city auditor’s contracted budget.”
The initial proposal would use $30,000 from unused funds for previous items, leaving a net zero impact on the budget.
City Manager Ed Shikada said that if staff can identify another firm able to conduct the audit for that price, the process would not require City Council sign-off to begin the work. But he acknowledged that the change “does certainly throw us a curve.”
Members of the committee — Council members Julie Lythcott-Haims and Keith Reckdahl and Vice Mayor Greer Stone — were divided on how to proceed without Baker Tilly.
Lythcott-Haims, who chairs the committee, suggested that the broader question of the city’s contract with Flock be taken up at a future City Council meeting. Reckdahl was more cautious, insisting that some audit be conducted so Palo Alto officials are more fully informed before they make a decision about the nature of the contract.
Stone appeared to straddle the positions of his colleagues, supporting a broader discussion about Flock with the appropriate data in hand.
“It’s a decision that the full council needs to make, but … I don’t see the point of spending money on an audit to then make that decision without the information from the audit,” Stone said.
While a couple of residents expressed support in public comment for proceeding with the audit even without Baker Tilly at the helm, others urged more immediate action by the council. Several cited the policies of nearby jurisdictions, including Santa Clara County, which terminated contracts with Flock due to data-sharing concerns.
Cara Silver, who lives in Midtown, mentioned with a tinge of irony that one of Palo Alto’s ALPRs is right by the “First Amendment corner” on Embarcadero Way and El Camino Real.
“There’s not really much point in having an audit if you already understand that ICE is going to be getting the data from Flock, and we are voluntarily giving that over to them,” said Midtown resident David Page. “It’s not the right thing to do.”
There are no reports as of publication date of out-of-state agencies accessing Palo Alto’s ALPR data, a fact that Reckdahl attributed to the city’s strict local requirements. The city approved the initial three-year contract with Flock in 2023, and the following year extended it through December 2029.
According to the Surveillance Use Policy that was approved alongside the initial Flock contract, other agencies must make a written request for the data and its purpose and earn approval from the Chief of Police. The access is then laid out as a formal memorandum of understanding between PAPD and the other agency.
“We fundamentally constrained ourselves; we put up safeguards that other cities didn’t,” Reckdahl said. “The fact that our data wasn’t used wasn’t dumb luck, we made that luck with hard work and paranoia.”
City staff are now tasked with finding an alternative auditing firm to perform the review of Flock in Palo Alto. Reckdahl also recommended that staff reach out to the city’s independent police auditor, OIR Group, to see if it is up to the task, given the familiarity with the PAPD.
Shikada said staff will pursue both routes in the coming months with the goal of returning to the full council for a broader discussion of Flock’s contract, including results of an audit, before June.
“There is an urgent need, I think, to convey information that is accurate and I think will turn out to be somewhat reassuring to our public,” Lythcott-Haims said. “I think we create more of a problem for ourselves if we delay the release of at least some of this key factual information.
