www.montereycountynow.com APRIL 2-8, 2026 MONTEREY COUNTY WEEKLY 21 capture biometric data about drivers or passengers. In Monterey County, law enforcement agencies in the cities of Salinas, Seaside, Monterey, Pacific Grove, Del Rey Oaks/Monterey Regional Airport, Sand City, Soledad and Greenfield, as well as the Monterey County Sheriff’s Office, all contract with Flock Safety. Although there is no official countywide map of all license plate reading cameras, camera locations in the City of Monterey are available on the city’s transparency portal. An unofficial open source map of the camera locations is posted at deflock.org. State laws regulate which agencies California law enforcement can share ALPR data with. Senate Bill 34, passed in 2015, prohibits agencies from sharing ALPR camera data with out-of-state and federal agencies to prevent misuse of the information and to bolster privacy protections. And SB 54, known as the California Values Act, passed in 2017, prohibits state and local law enforcement agencies, including school police and security departments, from using money or personnel to investigate, interrogate, detain, detect, or arrest people for immigration enforcement purposes. Due to public concerns and hard evidence that data collected by Flock Safety’s cameras had been inadvertently shared with out-of-state and federal agencies, including Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), some jurisdictions in the state have recently decided to cancel their contracts with Flock Safety, such as Santa Clara County and the cities of Mountain View and Santa Cruz, which in January 2026 became the first city in California to end its contract with the company. “Whether we are the first, second or last, our action is an act of defending the Constitution in the face of repeated efforts to get people to give up freedom for alleged safety which is not a trade I am willing to make,” Santa Cruz Mayor Fred Keeley says. Keeley believes that the Santa Cruz Police Department did not intentionally share information with out-ofstate and federal agencies, but that the information was accessed by other agencies nonetheless. “I have voted against Flock because I believe that after 9/11, we were told to trade privacy for security,” he adds. “I was and am not convinced that such a trade is consistent with personal freedoms guaranteed under the U.S. Constitution.” Monterey County Sheriff Tina Nieto says she is “very supportive” of the use of ALPR cameras for investigative uses and stresses that they are not used for surveillance purposes. “I know that there are groups out there that say, ‘Oh, they are surveilling the public,’ but that is against the law and it’s against my personal philosophy,” Nieto says. “We’re very aware of what’s happened with Flock, but the state laws are very specific. You cannot share the data outside of California with somebody else, because the feds could get access to it.” Following the reports of breaches in other areas, the department’s IT team audited its Flock data to see if it was shared with an out-of-state or federal agency but did not find a breach and decided to keep doing business with Flock Safety. However, a review of network audit reports—obtained by the Weekly through California Public Records Act requests (see p. 24)—shows a breach of state law, similar to Santa Cruz, occurred at the Monterey County Sheriff’s Office in 2025. According to the Sheriff’s Office’s audit reports, the agency shared ALPR camera data with law enforcement agencies in numerous other states, including Colorado, Michigan, Tennessee, Massachusetts, Oregon, Texas, Utah, Rhode Island and others. Nieto says that the breach of state law was unintentional and was not known to the Sheriff’s Office until the Weekly pointed it out. After studying the reports more thoroughly, Nieto says Flock Safety, not the Monterey County Sheriff’s Office, broke state law by allowing the department to share its data with out-of-state agencies. “I was made aware that due to a statewide system configuration error by Flock, user agencies outside the state of California were able to do a query of the information in our database,” Nieto said. “After identifying this issue, Flock was able to make changes to the system configuration which prevented this from happening further. This feature was disabled for all California agencies in March 2025.” Nieto says that despite the illegal data sharing, the Monterey County Sheriff’s Office will continue to use Flock Safety. “You don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater,” she says. “[It] shouldn’t happen again,” following changes made to the system by Flock Safety, she adds. Her department has explored other ALPR systems, but they are not cost-competitive. “Right now, for us as a county, Flock makes fiscal sense, because we have invested the dollars in it. And it’s solving crimes that we would probably not solve otherwise.” Other law enforcement agencies in Monterey County that use Flock Safety have shown only small signs that they are rethinking their relationships with Flock Safety or the use of ALPR cameras. Officials including Nieto and Seaside Police Chief Nick Borges express how useful of a tool the service is for their departments. Borges invited the Weekly to Seaside Police headquarters to show how he “It’s been a really incredible tool for us.” Seaside Police Chief Nick Borges (top) shows how officers use the Flock Safety interface, which requires a case number associated with a police report in order to search for a vehicle. DANIEL DREIFUSS DANIEL DREIFUSS
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