Richmond police chief shuts down license plate readers after discovering data was searchable
"National search" Flock feature exposed city's data in February so cameras have been offline for two weeks after incoming Chief Tim Simmons found out.
Richmondside
by Joel Umanzor
Dec. 9, 2025, 6:43 p.m.

Richmond's incoming police chief shut down the city's automated license plate reader system two weeks ago after it was discovered that the data had accidentally been made searchable earlier this year by outside agencies searching for a complete license plate number.

Richmond police said in a press release Tuesday night that there's no evidence any outside agency actually accessed or misused the city's data.

The data exposure occurred because a feature allowing the information to be nationally searchable was enabled on the city's system, according to newly appointed Chief Tim Simmons, who told Richmondside he recently learned of the issue.

The system has been offline since Simmons, who was announced last week as the successor to outgoing Chief Bisa French, learned of the situation.

"The moment I found out about this issue, I shut it off completely," Simmons said, noting he immediately notified the Richmond City Council.

Sources close to the department said a non-sworn employee was first notified by the reader data company, Flock, in February that the administrative two-way data sharing feature was active. That employee immediately had the feature disabled and reported it to a supervisor, who apparently retired without passing the information up the chain of command.

"The fact that it was made available was outside the scope of what we've been telling people and what has been told to us (by Flock)," Simmons said. "So that was enough for me to shut the whole system down."

Richmond has contracted for the $1 million-a-year service with Flock since 2023 and, in January 2025, expanded the contract by $1 million to add drone technology and gunshot and tire screeching detection. The city also contracts with Flock for video surveillance services, such as cameras in public places, which do not compile data from the images and will remain online.

Three council members dissented from expanding Flock contract last January

In the past, Flock representatives have told the city council that the system isn't accessible to outside agencies — a concern of several city council members, including Mayor Eduardo Martinez and Districts 5 and 6 council members Sue Wilson and Claudia Jimenez, who expressed concern about the Georgia-based company's ability to comply with the city's sanctuary policy, ultimately voting against expanding the contract. It was ultimately approved, with council members Jamelia Brown, Cesar Zepeda, Doria Robinson and Soheila Bana voting in favor of it.

The current Flock contract is set to expire this February.

A week after the vote to expand the contract, Martinez, who attended a march last February to support the city's undocumented community, said he wanted to revisit the contract due to concerns that the company wouldn't keep data inaccessible to federal agencies.

Wilson told Richmondside Tuesday that her main reason for voting against expanding the contract in January was the threat of it being accessed by outside agencies. She said the potential breach was "predictable."

"I just have no confidence that the Flock corporation is going to keep this information private," she said. "I knew this not because I'm some kind of security expert but because I googled Flock and read that the main reason they are popular is because of the interoperability."

The national search feature was presented during training as a way for Richmond detectives to search other jurisdictions' open databases using complete license plate numbers, sources told Richmondside. What Flock failed to disclose was that activating the administrative feature would be a two-way street, making Richmond's data searchable by agencies nationwide if those agencies had a complete license plate number.

Simmons said that the cameras are an important crime-solving tool, crediting them with helping police close cases in 12 hours or less in some instances.

Source: https://richmondside.org/2025/12/09/richmond-license-plate-reader-data-breach/