Mayor Gloria Hypes License Plate Readers, But Fails to Mention Abuses

By Seth Hall / Op-Ed SD Union-Tribune / November 20, 2025 

In his recent newsletter and across his social media accounts, San Diego Mayor Todd Gloria has been writing about how pleased he is that our city uses Flock Safety’s automated license plate reader (ALPR) technology, which is a network of 500 cameras blanketing San Diego roads, unblinkingly converting nearly 3 million vehicle images into trackable data every month. Gloria claims that hundreds of arrests have resulted from the technology’s use and millions of dollars worth of property have been recovered.

That’s not the whole story, though. As someone who works as part of the TRUST SD Coalition to understand the surveillance technology being used in San Diego, I know some other facts about Flock ALPR that should interest San Diegans.

For example, San Diegans might be interested in the June 2025 memo from San Diego Police Department admitting that San Diego’s Flock ALPR database had been left open to access by agencies outside of San Diego, resulting in thousands of searches of our vehicle records for reasons entirely outside our knowledge or control. That data breach was discovered and resolved in January 2024, but wasn’t disclosed until a public records request this year triggered San Diego police to disclose the incident to the city’s Privacy Advisory Board in June. For its part in the data breach, a representative of Flock apologized to our City Council’s Public Safety Committee later that month.

News of this breach of our data hasn’t made it to the mayor’s newsletters yet. Instead, Gloria praises Flock for being a “force multiplier.”

The city later provided the details that it had previously withheld, showing that San Diego’s Flock data had been accessed by 166 outside police departments, such as El Cajon police, which admits it shares ALPR data with federal agencies in open defiance of California law. In 2025, a growing number of cities like Austin and Denver have voted to reject Flock after leaders realized they had lost control of their city’s data by using Flock’s system.

There are more interesting incidents. Flock failed an audit by the state of Illinois. Researchers in Washington discovered that the U.S. Border Patrol had gained unpermitted “backdoor” access to the Flock data of several cities. Police in Texas, as part of a “death investigation” of a fetus, used Flock to perform a nationwide search for a woman who had an abortion. Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Oregon, has concluded that abuse of Flock technology is “inevitable,” and a group of legislators has called for a federal investigation into Flock’s business and technology.

But you won’t hear about any of these problems, or any proposed solutions for them, from our city leaders. Mayor Gloria instead praises Flock because it “supports precision policing by alerting officers only when a vehicle is linked to a crime.”

In Denver, a police officer with access to Flock ALPR was recently recorded bullying a woman who he was accusing of having committed a theft in his town. “You know we have cameras in that jurisdiction,” he told her, “and you can’t get a breath of fresh air, in or out of that place, without us knowing, correct?” The woman had to go “on the warpath” against the false accusations to prove her innocence.

This is the Flock technology Mayor Gloria says “reduces unnecessary stops and allows officers to focus their time where it’s needed most.”

The risks and dangers of Flock are now verified and increasingly well-known, but Gloria isn’t sharing them with San Diegans. City leaders are leaving it up to individual citizens to look deeper if we want to know anything beyond the happy talk.

It should be inconceivable in a first-class city like ours that we continue to use taxpayer dollars to fund a mass surveillance technology while evidence piles up that it threatens our neighbors and our rights, rather than keeping us safe. Supporters of the technology claim Flock might help solve some crimes, but they ignore the many other options for solving crimes besides resigning ourselves to a future of abusive, AI-enabled public tracking technology like Flock. The only Flocks in San Diego should be the flocks of people calling their elected leaders to demand this insane technology be purged from our city.

Seth Hall is co-founder of the community group sandiegoprivacy.org and lives in Allied Gardens.