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 system was sharing data with, ICE and CBP among them. Flock Safety-branded cameras (Falcon units) show up in the city’s own payment records starting in 2025, but — unusually for this project — we have not been able to find the underlying contract, a council vote naming Flock, or a documented install date anywhere in the city’s public record. This timeline lays out what is and isn’t documented.
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City Council accepts a federal grant to fund Pleasant Hill's first ALPR system
Pleasant Hill PD applied for a $14,083 Edward Byrne Memorial Justice Assistance Grant (JAG) to help pay for the city’s first Automatic License Plate Recognition system, budgeted at roughly $35,000 total — laid out in the department’s own grant program narrative, which cites a 41% year-over-year jump in reported auto theft as the justification. At a public hearing that night, the City Council adopted the resolution accepting the funds — though the surviving digitized copy’s own roll-call tally (AYES/NOES/ABSENT) is blank. The same packet includes a near-identical staff report dated August 6, 2007, apparently re-noticing the same item a second time.
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Pleasant Hill PD adopts a written ALPR policy — and names its ALPR system
Policy 462 of the department’s Lexipol policy manual, “Automated License Plate Readers (ALPRs),” took effect April 8, 2016. It names the system officers actually queried: the ARIES ALPR database, which required a case or event number logged as the “Reason for Search” on every query. Under the policy, ALPR data could be shared only with other municipal, state, and federal law enforcement or prosecutorial agencies, had to be retained for a minimum of one year under state law, and was declared not open to public review.
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A FOIA response shows exactly who Pleasant Hill's pre-Flock ALPR network was sharing with — ICE and CBP included
Responding to a September 16, 2019 California Public Records Act request from EFF researcher Dave Maass, Pleasant Hill PD’s outside counsel disclosed that the department scanned 814,950 license plates in 2016, 2,761,355 in 2017, and 11,292,582 in 2018 — with “hits” against a hotlist rising from 0 to 1,090 to 3,095 over the same three years. The attached data-sharing report, generated through the LEARN interagency ALPR network (the system Vigilant Solutions/Motorola operated before most agencies moved to Flock), lists dozens of agencies on both sides: among those Pleasant Hill was sharing its detections with was the Northern California Regional Intelligence Center; among those it was receiving detections from was Customs and Border Protection’s National Targeting Center, with plain “ICE” also listed on the same receiving-agencies page. Pleasant Hill reported sharing zero of its own hot-list entries with any outside agency, but received hot-list data from several others.
Sources & documents (1)
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Flock-branded cameras show up in the city's payment records — but not, so far, in any council vote
By April 25, 2025 at the latest, Pleasant Hill was paying Flock Group Inc. for camera service: a $5,150.00 payment against invoice INV-62433 for “FLOCK SAFETY SOL FALCON” hardware appears on the warrant register the City Council received May 5, 2025. The payments continued: $3,000.00 against invoice INV-70432 on the register received August 18, 2025, then a jump to $25,400.00 against invoice INV-79553, referencing purchase order PO/20050 on the register received December 1, 2025 — a larger sum that suggests either a contract renewal, a camera-count expansion, or both. Warrant registers are routine expense listings, not contract approvals, and we have not located the underlying services agreement, a council resolution naming Flock Safety, or a documented installation date anywhere in the city’s public record. The city’s current meeting portal (eScribe) only indexes full-text search back to roughly early 2025, and its older Granicus/ArchiveCenter agenda archive isn’t full-text searchable at all, so an earlier contract or vote — if one exists — may simply not be discoverable this way.
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Staff asks Council to put $40,000 of a state public-safety grant toward ALPR and PTZ camera expansion
The same August 18, 2025 packet that shows a Flock Group Inc. payment also contains a separate staff report recommending the Council adopt a resolution accepting Pleasant Hill’s ~$174,000 FY2025-26 California Supplemental Law Enforcement Services Account (SLESA) grant and committing $40,000 of it toward “Expansion and upgrading of the current Automated License Plate Reader (ALPR) program” and pan-tilt-zoom cameras, noting several existing ALPR cameras were “over five years old and have required repairs.” Notably, this report never mentions Flock by name — unlike the warrant register a few dozen pages earlier in the same packet. We could not confirm from the public agenda alone whether the Council actually adopted this resolution; no minutes for this meeting have been located yet.
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A records request confirms Pleasant Hill's cameras are on Flock's nationwide network — then gets rejected on a technicality
Researcher Syd Jones filed a California Public Records Act request via MuckRock for three specific Flock Safety Network audit records: searches of Pleasant Hill’s camera network logged by the Miami-Dade FL Sheriff’s Office, the Palos Heights IL Police Department, and the Marshall County AL Sheriff’s Office — the request itself is evidence Pleasant Hill’s cameras were reachable by out-of-state agencies through Flock’s nationwide search network as of October 2025. Pleasant Hill PD’s legal assistant responded that she “[is] not authorized to accept PRA requests” and redirected it to the City Clerk’s office. MuckRock’s tracker marked the request Rejected; there’s no record it was refiled with the Clerk, so the underlying audit data itself was never obtained.
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ALPR use gets one line in the department's annual accomplishments report
At a February 9, 2026 special Council meeting — an annual goals-and-accomplishments retreat, not a policy discussion — the Police Department’s presentation listed, among its Fiscal Year 2025 accomplishments, that it “Utilized Automatic License Plate Reader (ALPR) devices to identify and prevent property crimes, such as shoplifting, auto thefts, etc.” It’s the only other place ALPR is mentioned by name in the city’s searchable meeting record — confirming the program was still active and framed as a routine, uncontroversial tool as of early 2026, with no public debate attached to the mention.
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City files paperwork for a new Flock camera at Monument Boulevard and I-680
The City of Pleasant Hill filed a CEQA Notice of Exemption for a Flock Safety ALPR camera and solar panel mounted to an existing traffic-signal or streetlight pole, sited within Caltrans right-of-way at Monument Boulevard and I-680 — a freeway-adjacent location that needs this kind of separate environmental paperwork precisely because it sits on state, not city, right-of-way, unlike cameras on city-owned poles. The filing claims a “Categorical Exemption (Class 1, Section 15301, Existing Facilities)”, meaning no further environmental review was required. It’s the most recent documented expansion of the program: one additional camera, at one specific, previously undocumented intersection.
Know something we don't?
If you live in or near Pleasant Hill 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.