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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.
Mountain View Mayor Emily Ann Ramos told the Voice that she supported Canfield’s decision to disable the Flock cameras.
“I’m glad that our Police Chief decided to shut down the Flock Safety ALPR cameras and has been open about what took place with the data access that was in violation of our approved policies,” Ramos said in an emailed statement. She also encouraged residents to share their concerns at the Feb. 24 meeting.
“No matter how useful a technology may be, the most important tool for public safety is the trust of the community,” Ramos added.
Paris Lewbel, a Flock spokesperson, said the company was working directly with the police department and city to address its concerns and resolve issues.
“We look forward to resuming our successful partnership following the upcoming Council meeting,” Lewbel said in an emailed statement.
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.”
Kudos to MVPD for making the right decision. And kudos to MV Voice for raising the issue via local independent reporting.
As a professional in the B2B SaaS industry, I recognize a familiar pattern in the recent friction regarding Flock Safety: a “software failure” narrative being used to mask a fundamental breakdown in onboarding and user adoption. A vendor provides the infrastructure, but the client—in this case, the police department—retains sole responsibility for aligning internal policies with system configurations.
The issue isn’t “rogue AI” or a lack of transparency; it appears to be a classic failure of the RACI (Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, Informed) model. When a manager delegates setup to untrained personnel, critical configuration steps are missed. Blaming the vendor for a lack of internal oversight is simply “passing the buck.” In the Silicon Valley backyard, we should know better and my fellow software engineers understand this: a tool is only as effective as the policy governing it. Removing this digital shield doesn’t solve a configuration error—it merely signals to criminals that our streets are less protected. Those “federal” agencies didn’t specifically search Mountain View. They did an AI search of a database that was left open by the manager responsible for the Mountain View data at the police department. Take a look within before you cast blame on someone else. Good catch by the voice but not digging deep enough into the root of the issue and understanding how modern AI software work.
I urge the City Council to address the management gap rather than discarding a vital public safety asset.
Why would Flock have a nationwide search setting when it is illegal in California?Same with a california wide search when it’s meant to be restricted only to authorized partners within California? Seems to me like clear software/vendor flaws ….
The oversight stems from a Mountain View policy that was simply missed by the ALPR manager. It is essentially a configuration error: much like a photographer who forgets to set the internal clock on a new camera, the manager relied on the vendor’s default settings. They focused on the immediate output without verifying the backend parameters for data storage, searchability, or deletion. The manager likely assumed the vendor’s setup was sufficient and failed to perform the necessary due diligence.
When you work in this industry you see this a lot. Usually found by an outside person (the newspaper in this case), a new manager learning about the product, an audit, or by the vendor asking how things are going during contract renew. So many non-technical managers deferred to the vendor’s “out-of-the-box” configuration without verifying how data is actually being managed.
Or follow this: Linkedin and Facebook – Your settings are open to all till you set them to private. Starting to see how simple this is overlooked.
The vendor in this case is keeping the product as simple as possible, “How can we make this as user-friendly as possible?” Why, most employees of a police department have no technical background.
As Reid Hoffman and Eric Ries’ said (Internet & Start up entrepreneurs), “Minimum Viable Product is the version that allows maximum learning with least effort. Get the product going and in the clients hands and let them learn how to use it.
Police departments around the country had the same issue with red-light and speed enforcement cameras. But those are revenue generators. Same goes for agencies that place ALPRs on parking monitors vehicles.
perhaps, MV should put black bags over the cameras to make sure they don’t get turn on “accidentally. Clearly Flock can’t be trusted based on the several comments in the thread. Also big unsightly bags would 1) demonstrate to MV residents and workers that we’re really serious and 2) demonstrate just where law-abiding people going about their daily business are (were) being surveilled.
Thank you MV Voice for this reporting, and thank you MV police department for deactivating the cameras. Anyone who has installed software on their devices know that the settings can be changed at will by the companies. It’s best to remove the cameras.
I’d like to know how much benefits we’ve gotten from these cameras?
My guess is MVPD only shut off the storage server they control, I highly doubt the cameras are off. I’m assuming Flock owns the cameras, so the MVPD has no authority over these settings especially if they pause or stop a program (i.e. aren’t paying them money). This isn’t the first city to run into this situation, and I suspect their contract stipulates they are entitled to recover their camera costs, and messing with a private companies property is a crime. If there is a breach of a contract, then you have to take it through the courts, and get an injunction to shut down the cameras. I don’t see that process going well, especially after the MVPD and city council assured everyone that there are no privacy concerns and the information is public. Its effectively the same as trying to arrest someone on the corner of an intersection/sidewalk taking video. Your just violating their constitutional rights, its protected activity, but if you mess with their cameras your committing a crime. This means the cameras are likely still active and storing information at least locally on the cameras, until configured with a new remote storage location. Flock can also likely reconfigure them however they want at any time without any legal repercussions. This is why other cities have resorted to covering them with garbage bags.
I agree that the results myst be analyzed, and tge City Council must not allow a knee- jerk reaction over this. Especially if no one at the MTVPD knew enough to check occasionally, to see if the original settings had been over ridden or, were as they should have been, from the get- go!
If the retail & catalytic converter thieves are being caught (and deterred) or the out-of-the-area car thieves have gone elsewhere to steal cars in other cities, perhaps it’s worth keeping the cameras, and simply tightening up the settings so they can’t be changed from “headquarters”, as may have been done in this case.
Frankly, l don’t care if they see me driving to the grocery store or the bank. It’s the nefarious types & the criminals they’ll bother. But I would be against outside agencies using them.., especially if local taxpayers are paying for them!