San Pablo
San Pablo doesn’t run one license-plate-reader network — it runs three, side by side. A citywide Vigilant system (now rebranded Motorola, after Motorola Solutions bought Vigilant) has been in place since 2011; Axon supplies a smaller, request-only network; and in 2024 the city added a much smaller, 12-camera Flock Safety deployment on top of both. This timeline focuses on that Flock piece — how it got approved, when Flock actually shows up in city records, and what the city’s own monthly statistics say about it — while being upfront about the other two systems where they’re needed for context. No FOIA’d Flock audit and no organized public opposition specific to San Pablo has surfaced yet; what’s here is what the city’s own committee records, a contractor business license, and its self-published statistics actually show.
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San Pablo's first ALPR cameras go up — years before Flock, running on ODIN/Vigilant
Long before Flock, San Pablo already had license-plate-reader cameras. A 2018 City Council resolution recounts that in 2011, the City selected and contracted with ODIN Systems to implement a citywide surveillance system; by 2018 that vendor had designed, installed, and implemented 134 situational awareness cameras at fixed locations plus 16 automated license-plate-reader cameras running on 3M hardware. We haven’t found a document giving an exact 2011 date, vendor selection process, or original contract — only this later resolution’s own recap of it.
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Council replaces the old 3M cameras with Vigilant — after public pushback and an ACLU meeting
Still years before Flock: the City Council adopted Resolution 2018-060, authorizing up to $2,491,335 for a “City-Wide Public Safety Equipment Project” — up to 56 ALPR cameras and 60 situational-awareness cameras, replacing the current 3M cameras to operate on the Vigilant, HawkEye, and Live Earth software stack. The resolution’s own recitals document real pushback: at the March 19, 2018 Council meeting, the community raised concerns with the City-Wide Public Safety Equipment project specifically over privacy and data-sharing with federal immigration enforcement. A week later, Police Administration met with the local Chair of the ACLU Berkeley/North East Bay Chapter, and the resolution states Vigilant’s president and vice president signed with a liquidated-damages clause specifically so the company understood it will not be sharing any San Pablo PD data without the consent of San Pablo PD. This Vigilant system — since rebranded Motorola — is the network Flock was later added alongside, not replaced.
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Staff propose adding 12 Flock Safety cameras on top of the existing system
This is the first mention of Flock we’ve found in San Pablo’s records. Police Chief Brian Bubar’s staff presented a “Public Safety Camera Update” to the two-member Public Safety Standing Committee, recommending the Council receive presentation on Public Safety Equipment replacement and integration of Flock Safety technology, at an estimated cost of $84,000 which is within the Police Department’s existing FY 2024-25 and FY 2025-26 budget — meaning no separate appropriation vote was required. The accompanying slide deck lays out the pitch in detail: against San Pablo’s existing 20 Locations / 88 License Plate Readers (the Vigilant/Motorola system), staff pointed to neighboring Contra Costa agencies already on Flock, including Richmond: 70 ALPR cameras (plus El Cerrito, Hercules, Danville, Concord, Pittsburg, Bay Point, Alamo, Orinda, Oakley, and Kensington), and touted 400+ Law Enforcement Agencies in California already on Flock’s network, with No Paid Subscription for Access without Assets — i.e., other agencies could query San Pablo’s Flock cameras for free just by being on the network, the same default-sharing design that produced the exposure El Cerrito and other cities later had to lock down. The fiscal breakdown: the cost for Flock Safety ALPR service would be $44,400 for FY 2024-25, dropping to $39,600 in year two, for 12 Automated License Plate Readers — the slide names only 5 of the 12 planned locations (San Pablo Dam Road/Ventura/Amador; San Pablo Avenue/Rivers; Austin Court/Rivers; Market Avenue/Rumrill; and the 2300 block of El Portal Drive), with the rest shown only as unlabeled pins on a map. Per the committee’s own minutes, the item — like every other item that night — passed on a 2-0 vote (Councilmembers Xavier and Pabon-Alvarado) to refer it to the full City Council; no public comment was recorded on it.
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The clearest dated proof Flock actually arrived: a City of San Pablo contractor license
No signed Flock master services agreement for San Pablo has surfaced in a public records search (contrast with El Cerrito, where the signed contract itself is public). What we do have is the City’s own business-license roster: a June 2025 “All License Status Report” lists Flock Group Inc, 1170 Howell Mill Rd NW #210, Atlanta, GA — the company’s headquarters address — holding an active San Pablo contractor license, BL-00054, issued 6/10/2025 and valid through 6/4/2026. The listed contact is Mark Smith — the same name that appears as Flock’s General Counsel on El Cerrito’s signed 2023 contract. A business license isn’t a contract, but it’s the first dated, documentary confirmation we can point to that Flock was actually operating in San Pablo, roughly a year after the June 2024 committee presentation.
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Committee authorizes staff to evaluate bids for a broader camera-system overhaul
Not a Flock-specific item, but the meeting that set up the next entry: the committee reviewed the “FY 2025-26 Proposed Public Safety Camera Deployment and Implementation Plan,” voting to authorize City Manager and PD Staff to thoroughly evaluate/review the three (3) bids for the technology upgrade project and bring formal contracts back to the full Council, funded through the Supplemental Law Enforcement Services Grant (SLESF). Passed 2-0, no public comment. This is the process that produced the Motorola camera replacement below a month later — it’s included here because it shows the city treating Flock, Motorola, and Axon as one umbrella “public safety camera” modernization effort rather than tracking them separately in its own records.
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Council funds 20 replacement Motorola ALPR cameras — not Flock, but the system Flock sits alongside
Included for honesty about scale: this is the Motorola/Vigilant network, not Flock. The Council adopted Resolution 2025-134, appropriating $246,572 from the SLESF fund for 20 replacement Motorola ALPR cameras plus six backhaul upgrades. The resolution states that as of late 2025, the Public Safety Camera System includes 84 Motorola Automated License Plate Readers and roughly 300 situational cameras at 44 sites — because the Police Department is proposing the replacement of 20 of the oldest ALPR units, which had reached end of service life. The resolution’s own history section recaps that in 2011, the San Pablo Police Department implemented the original camera system — the same 2011 starting point as the 2018 resolution above. Flock’s 12 cameras are not mentioned anywhere in this resolution; the city’s Motorola fleet (84 units) dwarfs Flock’s footprint (12 units) roughly 7 to 1.
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The city's own monthly reports show Flock's reach — and who it's sharing with
Since at least March 2026, the San Pablo Police Department has posted monthly “Automated License Plate Reader and ShotSpotter Statistics” reports that break out reads by vendor. Flock Safety alone recorded 3,411,442 reads in March 2026, 2,983,987 in April, 4,955,157 in May, 2,249,940 in June, and 2,332,399 in July — from just 12 cameras, comparable to or exceeding the Motorola network’s ~4.1–4.4 million reads/month from 84 cameras each of those same months. Each report also includes a “Flock Data Sharing Report” appendix listing every outside agency connected to San Pablo’s network. The March 2026 edition’s summary page states plainly that The San Pablo Police Department CA Agency is Sharing its Detection data with the following Agencys: — followed by dozens of agencies as far away as Texas, Georgia, and Alabama, alongside the Bay Area agencies you’d expect. We haven’t independently verified how many of those relationships are two-way, automatic, or require approval; that would need the same kind of raw-audit-log analysis El Cerrito’s FOIA’d data allowed, which no one has filed for San Pablo yet as far as we’ve found.
Know something we don't?
If you live in or near San Pablo 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.