22 MONTEREY COUNTY WEEKLY APRIL 2-8, 2026 www.montereycountynow.com and others in the department use the ALPR system, which sends alerts to officers’ phones when a vehicle of interest passes by one of the 30 cameras dispersed throughout the city, displaying an image of the vehicle, its plate number and last recorded location. Borges says that once there is a “hit” on a vehicle they’re looking for, another will generally occur quickly, and officers can then determine which direction the vehicle is headed and make an arrest. He stresses that the cameras are not used for traffic or immigration enforcement. “It’s been a really incredible tool for us to have and the biggest concern that I’ve been hearing lately is the concern of who we share [the data] with,” Borges says. “That’s why agencies or city governments have been dropping these things.” According to Borges, the Seaside Police Department only shares the data collected by Flock Safety’s cameras, which is deleted 30 days after its capture, with agencies in California and one agency outside of the state: the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department. However, Borges says that the department is not breaking SB 34 because, “We can access their data but they cannot access ours. “The reason we do that, and that was a recommendation from the company, is we’ve had a lot of people involved in high-level crimes and arrested them in Las Vegas,” Borges says. “People like to go to Las Vegas after they’ve committed a crime. That’s the only place outside of the state and we don’t share with federal entities.” The department has to stay vigilant, though, with the Flock Safety software interface and Borges says they check it about once a week to ensure that the system is running as it should, nothing is being shared with the wrong agencies and nothing has been changed or hacked. “This is technology,” Borges says. “This is computer software. It’s online. It’s in a cloud so yes, someone could potentially breach this and change our data. And that’s why we’re checking it regularly.” Borges says that the department’s Flock Safety administrator may request or receive a request to share data with an outside law enforcement agency and if they are not careful, it is possible to click “yes” to a federal or out of state agency. “If you’re not paying attention, you’ve just given that [permission] to ICE, or you’ve just given that to somebody you may not want to give that to in law enforcement.” Sharing data with other law enforcement agencies, Borges elaborates, does not mean that another police department can pull an audit of every car that’s passed by an ALPR camera but can only see data for a vehicle that is associated with a crime or an investigation, as a vehicle search on the software interface requires a police report with an associated case number to curb potential abuse of the system. Along with the ALPR camera system, the Flock Safety devices in Seaside are equipped with audio detection equipment that sends officers alerts for gunshots, fireworks, glass breaking and tire screeching. “I really think this is a game changer,” Borges says. “And it’s not just criminality, it’s also missing people. The same system that alerts about a stolen vehicle is also putting in Silver Alerts, Amber Alerts and Ebony Alerts—all of those things,” Borges adds, referencing California’s mass text message notification systems for missing children or at-risk adults. “If there’s a vehicle associated with any of those things, that vehicle will automatically be uploaded into this database.” In one recent incident, the Flock system alerted Seaside PD to a stolen vehicle in the city. Officers responded to the alert and stopped the vehicle, and discovered it was stolen from San Antonio, Texas and was sold to the driver under false pretenses and at a low price that proved too good to be true. In the policing era before the emergence of ALPR cameras, Borges explains, crimefighting took a lot more effort and motivation. “In the old days, which was my era, you’re going to every business to try and find a camera. Then you’re trying to establish whether something is a Toyota or maybe a Mazda but it’s really blurry and it goes by fast,” Borges says. “If you have a good cop, they’re going to try and find cameras all throughout town, which is going to take all day.” So for Borges, ALPR cameras save police officers and investigators time and energy and ultimately make them more effective at their jobs. “My position is, if we are doing everything correctly and it’s working the way it’s supposed to, please don’t take this tool away from us,” Borges says. “If we do something wrong or make a mistake, we can totally understand that. But if it’s working and nobody’s privacy has been violated, and we’re totally monitoring this, this is one other tool that’s going to help us keep the public safe. I think it’s a phenomenal tool.” The increased efficiency for police departments comes with a cost, according to retired attorney and retired professor of constitutional law and legal writing at Monterey College of Law Michelle “Mickey” Welsh, who voiced opposition to the initial installation of Flock Safety ALPR cameras in the City of Monterey in 2024. For Welsh, police work should be difficult by design. “Our system is designed to be cumbersome,” she says. “So that there’s a balance between ease of police operations and civil rights. It depends on your societal values and our society has always valued personal individual liberties above making it easier for law enforcement.” Welsh penned a letter on behalf of the Monterey County chapter of the ACLU in 2024 to the Monterey City Council. The letter states, “ALPR systems will make our community less, not more, safe because they violate privacy, facilitate dangerous police stops, and risk exposing our immigrant community members to harm.” (On April 2, 2024, Monterey City Council approved the police department’s recommendation to implement an ALPR system. The city now has 35 cameras installed.) “It’s very dangerous to begin conducting surveillance against ordinary people who have done nothing to violate any law whatsoever,” Welsh says. “There’s clearly not only no probable cause to be tracking people but there’s not even a reasonable suspicion that they’ve done anything.” Welsh says that when Flock Safety or another ALPR camera service indiscriminately gathers data about the goings-on of every American with a vehicle with its nationwide network of cameras, it borders on breaking the Constitution’s Fourth Amendment, which protects people’s privacy and prohibits unreasonable searches and seizures by the government. “That is exactly the kind of thing that our Constitution and our founders opposed,” Welsh says. “They had no clue that this level of sophistication would ever occur. But still, when the Fourth Amendment to the Bill of Rights was ratified, people were dealing with police coming into their homes—and this is not people coming into their homes and going through their papers—for which a warrant is clearly required. This is warrantless “I know that there are groups out there that say, ‘Oh, they are surveilling the public,’ but that is against the law.” Michelle “Mickey” Welsh, a retired attorney and professor of constitutional law, says that the best way to prevent abuse of the data collected by automatic license plate readers is not to collect it in the first place. DANIEL DREIFUSS
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