Orinda

Orinda’s police department brought in its first surveillance and license-plate-reader cameras in 2015, under then-Chief Mark Nagel — a year before Flock Safety was founded, meaning this early system almost certainly ran a different vendor (not independently confirmed which one in this research pass). Nagel told CBS/KCBS “the police department’s solve rate of solving crimes was not an acceptable level to me” and that the cameras were meant to deter burglaries as much as solve them. By February 2016, the department credited the system with providing a key tip that led to the arrest of a suspect in connection with a brutal home invasion robbery that happened in December and was adding eight more cameras plus a cruiser-mounted reader.

Dreyer said his home in Orinda was broken into in January 2024, and rather than wait on the city, Knickerbocker neighborhood resident Evan Dreyer emailed his neighbors about pooling money for their own license-plate cameras. Within days, 30 families signed on, and they installed 2 Flock cameras at the main entrances to the neighborhood at a cost of a little over $11,000 for a two-year contract, about $400 per family — confirming Flock specifically as the vendor for this part of Orinda’s network, distinct from the city’s older, pre-Flock system. This wasn’t unique to Knickerbocker: the city had a total of 19 cameras at this point, and of those only 7 were installed by the city itself — the other 12 came from neighborhood groups or HOAs. EFF’s Karen Gullo raised the standard concern about a privately-initiated network that still feeds police: “What is the information being used for? And why is it OK for people’s license plates to be captured indiscriminately by law enforcement when people driving down the road are really not breaking any laws?” CBS News Bay Area sought comment from the mayor’s office and the police chief for this story; per the outlet, both refused the interview requests.