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. What’s not yet confirmed: whether the department has since moved to Flock Safety specifically, or is still running the same Vigilant-era system. The record below is what we’ve been able to verify so far — an honest gap, not a settled answer, on that last point.
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Police Chief brings the city's first ALPR program to Council for public comment
Per Senate Bill 34 (effective January 1, 2016), any public agency starting an LPR program has to give the public a chance to comment at a regular meeting before deployment — this was that meeting. Police Chief Manjit Sappal’s staff report proposed one fixed camera (Alhambra Avenue at Walnut Street) and mobile equipment mounted on two patrol vehicles, governed by Martinez Police Department Policy 439, Automated License Plate Readers.
Captured data would also feed into ARIES, the same countywide law-enforcement database referenced in other Contra Costa cities’ ALPR policies. Data would be stored for a minimum of one year (Government Code § 34090.6) on a server the report describes as located in Virginia — a detail that lines up with Vigilant Solutions’ hosting setup at the time, though this report itself doesn’t name a vendor.
Per contemporaneous press coverage, the roughly $97,000 cost came from the department’s own supplemental law enforcement funds, not the general fund, and Chief Sappal pointed to nearby Richmond, San Pablo, Piedmont, Danville, and especially Pittsburg as cities where similar cameras had already helped solve crimes. Vehicle thefts in Martinez had gone up 47 percent from 2015 to 2016.
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FOIA'd data-sharing report shows the system's real reach after less than a year
EFF’s Dave Maass (filing via MuckRock) requested Martinez PD’s ALPR data-sharing records under the CPRA. Police Commander Aaron Roth’s response confirmed the department does not have any ALPR data for 2016, as the department had not yet implemented this technology — corroborating the September 2017 rollout above.
The department’s Vigilant/LEARN “Agency Data Sharing Report” shows Martinez’s network sharing and receiving detections through Vigilant’s National Vehicle Location Service (NVLS) — a national data pool described in the report itself as reaching 544 agencies — with specific listed partners ranging from nearby Contra Costa departments (Brentwood, Pittsburg, San Pablo, Clayton) to out-of-state agencies in Texas, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and South Carolina. No hot-list sharing was reported in either direction.
A separate “Dashboard Hit Ratio Report” for calendar year 2017 shows Total Records: 1,485,984 — nearly all of it (1,485,252) plain detections, with 732 hits against watchlists — in the system’s first partial year of operation.
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EFF follows up, specifically asking whether Flock Safety has replaced the old system
Four years later, EFF’s Dave Maass filed a follow-up CPRA request via MuckRock, again asking for Martinez’s ALPR data-sharing numbers — but this time noting that “with Flock Safety, this information is available through the transparency portal function,” a detail that only makes sense to include if Flock was suspected of having replaced (or supplemented) the Vigilant/LEARN system documented above. We have not found a completed response to this specific request, and as of this writing Martinez PD does not appear on the (informally maintained, not necessarily complete) public list of active Flock transparency-portal pages. Whether Martinez’s current ALPR vendor is Flock Safety, a continuation of the 2017 Vigilant system, or something else entirely is an open question — flagged here rather than guessed at.
Sources & documents (1)
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