Flock Watch
The paper trail on license plate surveillance, city by city.
For each city, we line up FOIA responses, city documents, council meetings, and vendors' own public statements in the order they happened — so you can see for yourself where the pitch and the record don't match.
No cities match that search yet — tell us about one.
California
Contra Costa County
Antioch
Antioch runs a Flock Safety program, but there’s no public record of when it started, what it cost, or how many cameras exist — no council vote, staff report, or contract has surfaced anywhere in the city’s own agenda archive....
Brentwood
Brentwood swapped out an aging Vigilant ALPR network for 32 Flock Safety cameras in a unanimous March 2025 vote — a $240,000 deal that one councilmember publicly objected to being buried on the consent calendar. The more interesting story came...
Clayton
Clayton is a small city that keeps its own police department but contracts dispatch services from the City of Concord. We don’t yet have a Flock Safety contract, council vote, camera count, or install date for Clayton — what we...
Concord
Concord Police had license plate readers mounted on patrol cars since 2008 — Flock’s 2022 citywide network wasn’t the department’s first brush with the technology, just its biggest. This is what’s documented so far: the contract itself, and a resident...
Contra Costa County
The Contra Costa County Sheriff’s Office runs its own automated license-plate-reader program, separate from the 20 incorporated city/CDP police departments already covered on this site. The Sheriff’s Office is the primary law enforcement agency for the county’s unincorporated communities —...
Danville
Danville, like Lafayette and Orinda, contracts for police services from the Contra Costa County Sheriff’s Office rather than running its own department — but unlike Lafayette, Danville turns out to have its own separate Flock Safety contract and its own...
El Cerrito Deflocked
Flock Safety cameras went up in El Cerrito years before most residents knew they were there. This is the documented record of what happened next — how much data was shared before anyone outside Flock was watching, what the City...
Hercules
Hercules PD didn’t always own its own ALPR cameras — for years it just accessed a shared regional network. By the time a 2022 public records request forced a look at what had changed, the department had become an owner...
Kensington
Kensington isn’t a city — it’s an unincorporated community bordering El Cerrito, policed by its own small special district, the Kensington Police Protection & Community Services District (KCSD). It has its own separate Flock program, purchased about a year after...
Lafayette
Lafayette doesn’t run its own police department — it has contracted police services from the Contra Costa County Sheriff’s Office since incorporation, which means its Flock story isn’t a city council vote on a Flock contract like El Cerrito’s or...
Martinez
Martinez — the Contra Costa County seat — put its first license plate readers up in 2017, years before Flock arrived in most nearby cities. A FOIA’d 2018 data-sharing report shows exactly how far that early system’s reach already extended....
Moraga
Moraga’s cameras trace back further than most of this project’s other entries — a 2016 Town Council vote and a residents’ fundraising drive, years before Flock Safety entered the picture. What’s below is what’s documented so far: the original ALPR...
Oakley
Oakley Police has run automated license plate readers since at least 2018 — first through Vigilant Solutions, later adding Flock Safety cameras. The documented record here isn’t about a contested contract vote; it’s about Oakley being one of the state’s...
Orinda
Orinda is a growth story, not a removal story — and an unusual one on this site: most of its camera network isn’t run by the city at all. ALPR cameras first went up here in 2015, well before Flock...
Pinole
Pinole’s contract and installation history aren’t public yet — we haven’t found a council vote, staff report, or purchase order. What we do have is a 2022 public records request that got Pinole PD to confirm, in writing, that it...
Pittsburg
Pittsburg turns out to be a different kind of Flock Watch story: we found no evidence the city has ever signed a Flock Safety contract, no Flock-branded transparency page, and no Flock-specific filing in the state’s environmental-notice database — all...
Pleasant Hill
Pleasant Hill’s police department has run some form of automated license plate reader network for nearly two decades — a federally funded pilot in 2007, a 2016 written policy, and a 2019 records request that showed exactly who its pre-Flock...
Richmond
Richmond has the most turbulent Flock story in the county so far: a program that grew fast, got shut down entirely by an incoming police chief after a hidden “national lookup” setting exposed the city’s data to outside agencies, then...
San Pablo
San Pablo doesn’t run one license-plate-reader network — it runs three, side by side. A citywide Vigilant system (now rebranded Motorola, after Motorola Solutions bought Vigilant) has been in place since 2011; Axon supplies a smaller, request-only network; and in...
San Ramon
San Ramon has one of the lowest crime rates in the state — and one of the more sweeping camera buildouts in the county. In a single April 2020 vote, the City Council approved a $1.2 million citywide network combining...
Walnut Creek
Walnut Creek already had license plate readers — an older Vigilant Solutions system — before it switched to Flock. This timeline starts where the record gets specific: the 2025 vendor switch that expanded the network, a resident who pushed back...
Have a city we should be watching?
If Flock or a similar surveillance vendor is operating in your city and you have documents, FOIA responses, or meeting records to share, send them to contact@nosurveillancepledge.com and we'll start a timeline.