24 MONTEREY COUNTY WEEKLY APRIL 2-8, 2026 www.montereycountynow.com surveillance of everyone, everywhere.” ALPR camera systems are legally allowed because they are posted in public roadways in plain view, where courts have found there is no reasonable expectation of privacy. Although police departments do have safeguards to prevent abusing the system, such as associating each license plate search with a police report, Welsh argues that the easiest way to prevent abuse of the system is to never gather the data at all. Welsh says that for her, the issue has two aspects: the privacy violations that occur whenever someone drives through an intersection where a camera is recording, and what happens to the data after it is recorded and who has access to it. “As they learned in Santa Cruz and Santa Clara [County] and many other places—over 30 jurisdictions have already canceled their Flock contracts or limited their use—the data has in fact been accessed, and has been accessed by other states and by federal agencies, to track people. And it has, in fact, been used to track protesters at rallies and it’s been used to identify and track undocumented people.” In network audits produced by various local agencies in response to a Public Records Act requests, search time and date are listed on a spreadsheet for dozens of searches. (Some agencies also include license plate number, while others redact this information.) A column for “reason” mostly lists “investigation,” sometimes a specific felony charge, welfare check or missing person. One reason listed in a Seaside network audit on Feb. 3, 2025, is “immigration protest.” Welsh is referring more broadly to incidents reported by organizations such as the Electric Frontier Foundation, showing that law enforcement agencies had conducted searches related to political demonstrations such as No Kings rallies, and Cal Matters, which found that California law enforcement agencies had shared data with ICE, a breach of the California Values Act. In the cases of Santa Cruz and the Monterey County Sheriff’s Office, state law was broken when the departments shared data with outside agencies—unknowingly or not. After the news broke in Santa Cruz in late 2025, pressure from community members and groups, namely Get the Flock Out, the Santa Cruz City Council ultimately ended the city’s relationship with Flock Safety. In Monterey County, no concrete community group has emerged to oppose the use of ALPR cameras, but there are individuals expressing concerns at local government meetings, such as Pacific Grove-based activist Colleen Ingram. Ingram is a co-founder of PG Progressives, helped restart Indivisible Monterey and is active with 50501 Monterey County. “My primary concern is that the cameras are being used for much more than just license plate reading,” Ingram says. “It’s mass surveillance. It’s policestate surveillance that’s concerning.” Ingram points out that the cameras are being sold to jurisdictions with the promise of protecting the public from murderers and kidnappers, but like Welsh, she believes that the drawbacks aren’t worth the benefits. “We’re losing a lot of our rights and our privacy and they’re going to be weaponized against us at some point with this administration,” Ingram says. “And when people here bring up concerns about it, our cities just say that [Flock Safety] can’t do [illegal data searches] because it’s in our contract and we do audits. But how far do their audits go and how savvy are they with this technology?” Ingram says she hopes local cities end their contracts with Flock Safety or at least allow the systems to be monitored or audited by a third party. “Ultimately, they should be taken down,” she says. “But I know that’s not going to happen.” Some local officials have expressed skepticism about the ALPR camera systems and illegal data sharing, like Soledad Mayor Anna Velazquez. In 2024, the Soledad City Council approved a contract with Flock Safety, and Velazquez says there weren’t many concerns about the system at that time. “When the City of Santa Cruz experienced their breach of contract, that’s when I started to get more concerned because we have that same system,” she says. At a Soledad City Council meeting in late January, where a representative from Flock Safety gave a presentation about the system, Velazquez voiced those concerns and expressed the need for a local policy that would make it clear that Soledad would not share its Flock Safety data with federal immigration agencies. “We want to ensure that we can keep our communities safe,” Velazquez says. “And at the same time, we want to ensure that our residents trust the police department and also trust us enough to report crime and not be afraid of our police department.” On March 18, the Soledad City Council approved revisions to Police Department’s existing ALPR policy with additional language, modeled after a similar policy of the Salinas Police Department that stresses it would not share ALPR data with ICE or U.S. Customs and Border Patrol, and another provision compelling the chief of police or their designee to consider the policy before authorizing the release of ALPR data to other California cities. “My hope is that the system will be a mechanism, another tool that law enforcement can use to fight criminal activity and be able to have a safer city,” Velazquez says. “But also, we have to ensure that it’s not in any way, shape or form violating or compromising the trust of our community or that it’s violating or compromising the dignity or the civil rights of our community either.” AUDITING THE AUDITS A look at the public records behind this story. By Sara Rubin To report this story, the Weekly began by filing California Public Records Act requests with 14 local law enforcement agencies seeking copies of automated license plate reader network audits. Two (the City of Gonzales and CSU Monterey Bay) did not have an ALPR system installed. The remaining 12 agencies responded with varying degrees of specificity. The departments for Seaside, Marina, Del Rey Oaks/Monterey Regional Airport District, Pacific Grove and Monterey County Sheriff all recently conducted network audits, so they produced voluminous spreadsheets that list vehicles, names, search times and the reason for the search. As Sheriff Tina Nieto notes, after her agency decided to conduct a network audit, the process gives them insight into whether Flock Safety is complying with the law, but also creates a detailed public record, potentially revealing more personal information: “Is there a benefit there?” she asks. Most agencies queried said they had not conducted network audits, so did not have records to produce. (Those are Greenfield, Soledad, Carmel and Sand City. King City PD did not respond to the Weekly’s requests.) The police departments of Monterey and Salinas denied the Weekly’s request for network audits, arguing that they are exempt from the Public Records Act as part of ongoing investigations. Salinas Police Records Controller Bianca Navarro-Raya responded, “Police records are generally exempt from disclosure.” In Monterey, Senior Administrative Analyst Alma Altamirano Murphy wrote, “The requested organization and network audits of the Flock system reveal the specific license plate numbers and/or vehicle descriptions searched in the ALPR system, the date of the search…these fields reveal the analysis and targeted investigative efforts of the officers as they attempt to track down suspects, witnesses and other leads.” Monterey’s transparency portal (at transparency.flocksafety.com/monterey-ca-pd) offers aggregate data, such as the number of vehicles detected in the last 30 days (408,864, as of this writing) and “hotlist hits” over the same time period (1,081). The cities of Carmel and P.G. also provide similar transparency portals. The California Supreme Court has ruled that raw ALPR data can indeed be treated as investigatory records, because “the act of revealing the data would itself jeopardize the privacy of everyone associated with a scanned plate.” The court left open the possibility that the data could be disclosed if it is feasible to redact it. Of course, as we have seen with some local agencies, they could just choose to err on the side of transparency and disclose the audit information, some with license plate numbers redacted (as Marina did) to anonymize the data and still protect privacy. “There’s a balance between ease of police operations and civil rights.”
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