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 things several of its Contra Costa County neighbors do have. What Pittsburg has instead is an older, non-Flock automated license plate reader network, running on Vigilant Solutions (a Motorola Solutions product) since roughly 2008, years before Flock existed. A 2022 public-records request revealed that network was logging tens of millions of scans a year and sharing that data with agencies well beyond California, including federal immigration and drug enforcement. This is that record — not a Flock record, but the same kind of “what’s actually documented” accounting this project applies everywhere else.
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A license-plate-reading camera network already existed — years before Flock did
In a November 2023 staff report, Police Chief Steve Albanese described the department’s camera network as having been “developed over the last 15 years,” which puts its origin around 2008 — nine years before Flock Safety was even founded (2017). We have not found a document naming the exact launch date, but the 2022 public-records response below confirms the vendor running Pittsburg’s system is Vigilant Solutions/Motorola Solutions, not Flock.
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14 license-plate-reading cameras go up along Highway 4
After two shootings on Highway 4 that spring, Pittsburg finished installing 14 traffic cameras along the highway, joining more than 120 already up across the city. Police Captain Ron Raman said the cameras, several of them with license plate readers, served two purposes: “one, it’s a deterrent to people coming into our city and two, it’s an investigative tool should something happen on the freeway.” Footage would be kept 90 days. The city spent $100,000 on the installation.
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First week: seven arrests, four stolen cars recovered
Within the new cameras’ first six days live, police reported seven arrests and four recovered stolen vehicles. Police Chief Brian Addington: “When we were able to put the license plate readers on, we knew they were going to be a benefit, but I don’t know that we knew we’d have this much ability to locate and recover stolen vehicles, get those cars back to the owner, and arrest the ones stealing them.” Press commentary, not meeting testimony — the department deployed a dedicated team to manage the resulting highway alerts.
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Still running five years later — cited as a model while Oakland debates its own cameras
By 2021 Pittsburg’s highway network included cameras triggered by ShotSpotter technology as well as license plate readers. Pittsburg police and the Contra Costa County District Attorney’s Office told press the cameras hadn’t stopped freeway shootings outright, but were “invaluable when something does happen, helping to identify suspects, or witnesses after a shooting.” This is press commentary about Pittsburg’s system, published in an article that’s mainly about Oakland weighing whether to build its own — not a Pittsburg city statement.
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EFF requests Pittsburg PD's ALPR sharing records and scan totals
On November 1, 2022, Dave Maass, director of investigations at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, filed a California Public Records Act request through MuckRock asking Pittsburg PD for: every agency it shares ALPR data with, every agency it receives ALPR data from, its “hot list” sharing partners, and the aggregate number of “detections” and “hits” for 2021 and 2022. The department’s Nov. 10 letter acknowledged the request and began the review; two more interim letters followed on Nov. 23 and Dec. 7 before the substantive records arrived Dec. 21 (next entry).
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The records: 39 million scans in under a year — and Pittsburg's plate data was flowing to ICE, CBP, and the DEA
Pittsburg PD’s Dec. 21, 2022 final response gave EFF the numbers directly: 34,222,496 “detections” in 2021 and 26,782 “hits” (plates matched to a hotlist); 39,172,523 detections and 31,966 hits from January 1 through the date of the response in 2022 — a partial year already ahead of 2021’s full-year total.
The accompanying agency data-sharing report — a Vigilant VehicleManager printout dated December 6, 2022, 51 pages long — lists every outside agency Pittsburg’s system was sharing detection data with at that point: hundreds of law-enforcement agencies across dozens of states, and, among them, federal agencies including ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations, listed with a Washington, D.C. address (“ICE ERO”), DHS’s Homeland Security Investigations (“HSI MASTER,” plus a separate HSI Bulk Cash Smuggling Center entry and a DHS–HSI New Orleans entry), CBP’s National Targeting Center, multiple DEA field offices, and the San Diego Sector Border Patrol. California’s SB 34 (2015) bars state and local ALPR agencies from sharing plate data with federal immigration agencies and out-of-state entities; this FOIA’d report documents Pittsburg’s system doing exactly that as of its own date stamp — years before the 2025–2026 wave of Bay Area cities discovering similar exposure in their Flock systems. We have not found a follow-up document showing whether this sharing configuration was later changed.
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Police ask City Council to fund an expansion of the camera network
Ahead of the Nov. 20, 2023 City Council meeting, Chief Albanese’s staff report asked the council to accept a $37,029 federal grant — from the Justice Department’s Edward Byrne Memorial Justice Assistance Program — to cover most of the cost of additional cameras, meant to “keep up with the city of Pittsburg’s geographical growth and expansion.” The meeting itself is on the record with the city — agenda and video are indexed on Pittsburg’s CivicClerk portal — but CivicClerk serves its files through a JavaScript app that doesn’t respond to a direct fetch, so we were not able to retrieve the minutes ourselves to confirm the vote’s outcome. Treat the vote result as unconfirmed; the request itself is document-backed.
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No Flock Safety contract found — Pittsburg still runs its own, older ALPR system
We looked for a Flock Safety contract the way we did for every other city on this page: the city’s own CivicClerk meeting portal (the same platform El Cerrito uses), the state’s CEQAnet environmental-notice database (which has Flock-specific “Notice of Exemption” filings for dozens of California cities, including several other Contra Costa County agencies), and Pittsburg PD’s own website. None of them show a Flock contract, a Flock-branded transparency page, or a Flock camera-location filing for Pittsburg — the kind of records Richmond, El Cerrito, Concord, and other nearby cities in this project all have on file. The FOIA’d records above independently confirm the vendor actually running Pittsburg’s existing system is Vigilant Solutions, a Motorola Solutions product, not Flock hardware. This is an absence finding, not a document — we can’t rule out a contract we simply didn’t find, and we did not attempt to contact the department directly to confirm it.
Know something we don't?
If you live in or near Pittsburg and have an update, a correction, or context worth adding — a FOIA response, council document, email, public statement, or just something you noticed or heard about that isn't reflected here — send it to contact@nosurveillancepledge.com with dates and a link or scan where you can, and we'll add it with a source.