Mountain View City Council voted unanimously tonight (Feb. 24) to cancel its contract with Flock Safety, an automated license plate reader company, after data from city cameras was accessed by federal and state agencies without permission.
Council heard from dozens of residents of both Mountain View, and nearby cities, urging council members to end the contract and to not replace Flock’s cameras with another company’s.
Mountain View Police Chief Mike Canfield announced Feb. 2 that he was shutting down the city’s 30 Flock cameras after data breaches were discovered.
“While the Flock Safety pilot program demonstrated clear value in enhancing our ability to protect our community and help us solve crimes, I personally no longer have confidence in this particular vendor,” Canfield said in a letter to the community.
One data breach was from August to November 2024, just after Mountain View’s first license-plate reading camera was installed. During that time, a “national lookup” setting was turned on in Mountain View’s system, without the city’s knowledge, and several federal agencies searched data from the one camera the city had installed at the time. Those included Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives offices in Kentucky and Tennessee and Air Force bases in Virginia and Ohio, among others – but ICE wasn’t involved, the city said.
According to the city, Flock wasn’t able to determine how the national lookup feature was turned on, or how it was turned off. A Flock spokeswoman told the Post previously that the settings “are always under the control of the agency.”
California law bans sharing data from automated license plate readers with federal agencies and those outside of the state. Flock Safety disabled the national lookup feature for all California agencies in March 2025.
And although sharing data with other California agencies is allowed, Mountain View requires those agencies to first get permission and sign an agreement with the city.
But starting in August 2024, a “statewide lookup” feature was turned on that gave California agencies access to the city’s license-plate data without getting permission. Mountain View police discovered the issue in January 2026 and turned the feature off.
“At no time during the implementation calls, meetings, tutorial, onboarding, or related presentations was a statewide or nationwide lookup tool discussed, demonstrated, or presented to MVPD as a configurable feature,” Canfield said in a report to council for the meeting.
The city has paid Flock $154,650 since starting the program.
Canfield said the system has helped investigators in 87 commercial burglary cases, 65 car burglaries and 42 residential burglaries. The system helped Mountain View police identify or arrest 41 suspects.
And license plate data used while working with police in other cities helped resolve a number of serious cases, including a domestic violence-carjacking case where the suspect was arrested in San Francisco and the rescue of a kidnapping victim in San Jose.
Fools.
Mountain View Police Chief Mike Canfield’s use of vague language to enumerate the systems successes leaves me wondering just how successful it really has been. Chief Canfield says the system “helped” in 87 + 65 + 42 = 194 cases. “helped” seems like a pretty low bar. The coffee the officers drank while working on these cases also “helped” but didn’t cost $154,650. Then Chief Canfield goes on to say that of the 194 cases in which the system “helped”, it only “helped” “identify or arrest 41 suspects”. Why does Chief Canfield lump “identify” and “arrest” together? How many arrests were actually “helped” by the system? How may of the suspects arrested were actually convicted? How many suspects were misidentified by the system and how many of the suspects would have been arrested anyway using good old fashion police work without any “help” from the Flock system?
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