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 later: the same resolution that approved the city’s own cameras also opened the door for private parties — HOAs, businesses, neighborhood watch groups — to buy their own Flock hardware and feed it into the same searchable database. By mid-2026 that door had already been walked through, after a homeowners association installed four of its own cameras under a city permit issued “by mistake.”
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Council votes 5-0 to replace Vigilant ALPR with 32 Flock cameras
The Council voted 5-0 to approve a two-year, not-to-exceed $240,000 agreement with Flock Group, Inc. for 32 ALPR cameras and 3 solar-powered surveillance cameras, replacing 19 existing Vigilant cameras that Police Chief Tim Herbert said were at end of life and poorly supported since Vigilant’s acquisition by Motorola.
The approval wasn’t smooth — Councilmember Jovita Mendoza objected to a quarter-million-dollar item being placed on the routine consent calendar, and Vice Mayor Pa’Tanisha Pierson pressed Flock’s own Kristen Macleod on Fourth Amendment and data-sharing concerns during a lengthy back-and-forth.
Herbert told the Council the department’s ALPR program dated to 2015, growing from an 18-camera 2016 pilot to 56 total cameras (fixed and patrol-vehicle mounted) by the time of the Flock vote. The signed agreement itself confirms Flock deletes footage on a rolling thirty (30) day basis.
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A councilmember discovers an HOA already has its own Flock cameras
Councilmember Jovita Mendoza told the Council that the Shadow Lakes Homeowners Association had installed four of its own Flock cameras under a permit the city had issued — not through the police department’s program. Her concern: any member of the HOA’s own board could review the camera data with no background check. Flock, not Shadow Lakes, had handled the permit application itself. Mendoza asked for the item to come back for full discussion.
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Council votes 4-0 to review private Flock cameras — city admits the HOA's permit was a mistake
Brentwood’s Director of Engineering, Allen Baquilar, told the Council the Shadow Lakes permit had been issued by mistake as part of the broader police department agreement with Flock, and the city was working to correct it.
Shadow Lakes’ HOA secretary, Sue Harper, defended the association, saying it “followed the city’s permitting process, obtained the required approvals, and complied with applicable laws,” and that the board had since voluntarily limited its own administrative access to professional management staff.
Mendoza argued private Flock deployments needed real oversight — noting the HOA’s own data-sharing terms with Flock aren’t bound by the same out-of-state-sharing restrictions as the police department’s contract. Councilmember Faye Maloney agreed accountability was missing; Councilmember Tony Oerlemans and Vice Mayor Pierson both supported bringing the item back. Mayor Susannah Meyer, a Shadow Lakes resident, recused herself but said before leaving that she did not support Flock cameras in her own HOA. The item passed in a 4-0 vote, directing staff to return with recommendations on whether — and how — to allow privately operated Flock cameras within the city.
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