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Despite local officials’ claims to the contrary, hundreds of law enforcement agencies from around the country searched data from Palo Alto’s automatic license plate reader cameras over a period of about a year, according to public records obtained by this publication.
The city’s ALPR cameras, operated by Flock Safety, Inc., were made available to out-of-state and federal agencies beginning in late 2023 through a “nationwide lookup” search feature. The feature allowed law enforcement to search Flock’s entire nationwide network of 6,000 cameras, including those in Palo Alto. At the time, the city maintained 20 ALPRs, and 10 cameras were added in 2024 through a contract amendment with Flock that is set to expire at the end of 2029.
The Weekly filed a records request via the California Public Records Act to the police department on March 10 for monthly network and organization audits maintained by Flock Safety for Palo Alto’s ALPRs. The network audits maintain a record of every time an outside agency conducted a search that included Palo Alto’s cameras in the result, while the organization audit tracks all searches by Palo Alto officers.
Police Chief James Reifschneider wrote in a statement to this publication that the police department was not aware of the nationwide search feature until December 2025. When the department inquired about the issue to Flock, it learned that the company disabled the nationwide search for Palo Alto in October 2024.
Flock disabled the feature across the entire state in March 2025, Reifschneider added.
“The feature did not enable targeted searches of any specific agency’s data,” Refischneider wrote. “These searches could only be performed system-wide when a full 7-digit license plate number was known and only based on the articulation of a legitimate law enforcement purpose.”
Sharing ALPR data with out-of-state and federal agencies is prohibited under state law that became effective in 2016. Palo Alto’s rules are even more strict. According to the Surveillance Use Policy that was approved alongside the initial Flock contract, other law enforcement agencies must make a written request for the data and its purpose and earn approval from the police chief. Access is then laid out as a formal memorandum of understanding between PAPD and the other agency.
According to public records, law enforcement agencies from nearly every state performed searches that included Palo Alto’s cameras. Federal agencies such as the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms and the National Park Service were also listed as conducting searches.
Reifschneider explained that while Palo Alto’s data was part of the national searchable dataset, Flock confirmed to the department that no actual data, such as license plate images, were received by out-of-state or federal agencies.
“In other words, PAPD had no records that matched the ‘Nationwide Lookup’ searches performed by out of state or federal agencies,” Reifschneider said.
Between July 2023 and October 2024, tens of thousands of searches were performed by outside agencies and California law enforcement, according to audit reports obtained by this publication. A preliminary analysis of the data indicates that Palo Alto’s ALPR cameras were available for nationwide search inquiries as early as July 12, 2023. Searches from this day include, for example, the Missouri State Highway Patrol, the Chicago Police Department, the Mid-States Organized Crime Information Center, Houston Police Department and Flock Safety Sales, the latter of which conducted two searches on July 12 and two more on July 13.
Searches by out-of-state agencies stopped after October 2024, according to a preliminary analysis by this publication.
The reason for each search was redacted in the records that were provided to this publication so as not to “compromise law enforcement efforts of the Palo Alto Police Department and other law enforcement agencies,” according to the department.
Prior to the records requested by this publication, multiple Palo Alto leaders said in public meetings over the past several months that out-of-state agencies were not able to access the city’s data, as far as they knew. The topic had recently become a hot-button issue after the Mountain View Voice reported that hundreds of agencies across the country accessed ALPR data there, prompting the city to shut down the cameras and terminate its contract with Flock.
In Menlo Park, an investigation by The Almanac found that the city’s police allowed thousands of out-of-state searches by law enforcement in Texas and Illinois.
Other cities have also limited or otherwise disabled their cameras. San Jose last month passed additional restrictions on how ALPR data is collected and stored, and Santa Clara County terminated its contract with Flock in February. The county Sheriff’s Office operated the cameras in Los Altos, Cupertino and Saratoga because the cities contract with the county instead of maintaining their own police forces.
East Palo Alto, however, recently doubled down on its ALPR cameras at a council meeting on April 21. City leaders were split on whether to sever ties with Flock or maintain the three-year contract approved in December, and their inability to agree on a motion means that the contract is now cemented without the option to back out or receive a refund.
Advocates in each of these communities, as well as in Palo Alto, have raised concerns for years about the potential for unauthorized data sharing. Until recently, Palo Alto leaders were touting the city’s stricter policies as a success story amid investigations, lawsuits and contract cancellations in neighboring jurisdictions.
“We fundamentally constrained ourselves; we put up safeguards that other cities didn’t,” Council member Keith Reckdahl said at a March 10 meeting. “The fact that our data wasn’t used wasn’t dumb luck, we made that luck with hard work and paranoia.”
Even before the extent of data access became public, some council members have been raising concerns about Flock technology, citing breaches elsewhere. Earlier this year in Palo Alto, the council Policy and Services Committee discussed an independent audit of Flock cameras in the city in response to concerns in neighboring cities about data privacy. But the City Auditor’s Office, which is run by the consulting firm Baker Tilly, recused itself from the audit because the firm also maintains Flock as a client.
Reifschneider said in an interview earlier this month that the city and the police department are still on the hunt for an independent auditor able to do the job. In the interview, he explained that he believed data sharing concerns were adequately addressed by the department’s policies and changes to Flock’s nationwide search database.
“If the audit didn’t bear out that the problem has been fixed, and we did have lingering concerns, then I would certainly be open to exploring an alternative vendor, or whatever the next appropriate step would be,” Reifschneider said in the April 7 interview.
When reached for comment about Palo Alto’s data sharing, Flock Safety referred to a news release from March that details new safety guardrails to prevent future unauthorized searches by out-of-state agencies.
Flock also sent an email to the Palo Alto Police Department in February that acknowledged the out-of-state data sharing and explained statewide upgrades to its policies. The email is available publicly on the police department’s website.
“It is no longer possible for California agencies to create sharing relationships with out-of-state or federal agencies, either deliberately or by mistake, and such sharing cannot be enabled by Flock,” the email reads.
In his April 21 statement about the searches by out-of-state agencies, Reifschneider said the department found no searches performed by ICE, Customs and Border Patrol or the Department of Homeland Security. None of the searches “appeared to be associated with immigration enforcement or reproductive rights enforcement,” Reifschneider added.
As ALPR data breaches continue to be discovered across the country, advocates such as the American Civil Liberties Union have raised concerns about the potential of mass surveillance to be used to carry out the Trump administration’s crackdown on immigration and reproductive rights. Palo Alto police officers are prohibited by a department policy from assisting with immigration enforcement or asking about immigration status for that purpose during an arrest.
While the independent audit of Flock cameras remains to be determined, Reifschneider said that the department will begin proactively publishing redacted Flock search logs on a monthly basis starting this week, in response to this publication’s inquiry and public interest.
The logs will include searches performed by Palo Alto officers as well as those from other agencies, and will be available to the public on the department’s ALPR webpage.
“The Department is confident that its training, Surveillance Use Policy, 30-day data retention period, and requirement of an MOU for each agency with which it shares, meet or exceed industry standards,” Reifschneider wrote in the statement.
