Watsonville first funded the license plate readers in 2023, approving $140,000 for 20 cameras and a two-year contract with Flock. Now, the City Council is voting on whether to approve another two-year contract for up to $251,000 for 37 cameras. The item, recommended by interim Police Chief David Rodriguez, is on the consent agenda alongside several others, including contracts with construction companies and amendments to housing ordinances. The 15 items on the consent agenda will be voted on with a single motion, following a general public comment period. Any items removed from the consent agenda will be considered separately.
“Currently, images and video from public and private security systems are critical tools in investigating and gathering information about crime incidents,” a city official wrote in a staff report. “Our police officers often make multiple visits to businesses and residences after an incident, particularly a violent crime, in search of camera images or video that will help identify suspect vehicles, suspects, and other elements of the crime.”
The Watsonville Police Department started using the cameras in September 2023. According to the staff report, the Flock Automated License Plate Reader System is a deployment of cameras throughout an area to provide greater coverage and more detailed information for law enforcement. The cameras capture date, time, location, license plates, vehicle details, as well as other objects, compared to other systems that only capture license plate information. All data collected is downloaded to a CJIS (FBI Criminal Justice Information Services) compliant cloud-based server.
There have been reports that law enforcement agencies in California have shared data from these cameras with federal agencies, including U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Control. Now, Santa Cruz County residents have formed a campaign, Get the Flock Out, protesting the cameras. They cite concerns that the cameras’ data is not secure and could be misused. The group reached out to the Santa Cruz, Capitola and Watsonville city councils, asking them to pause their contracts with Flock until there is wider public discussion about the cameras.
“It came as a shock to us,” said Lourdes Barraza, a founding member of Get the Flock Out based in Watsonville, when she learned about the Flock license plate readers appearing on the consent agenda after it was released Thursday. She said that the council’s move to not only renew the contract, but to add more cameras, was “insane.”
Barraza said she and other members of the campaign have been reaching out to other local groups in hopes of gathering an alliance to speak against the Flock contract during public comment. She said she hopes the council will remove the item from the consent agenda to allow for more thorough discussion, either at this meeting or in the future.
The staff report pointed to the Watsonville Police Department’s policy manual, which states the department “does not permit the sharing of ALPR (Automated License Plate Reader System) data gathered by the City or its contractors/subcontractors for purpose of federal immigration enforcement, pursuant to the California Values Act.”
State Sen. Sabrina Cervantes, a Democrat from Riverside, introduced a bill to regulate automated license plate readers earlier this year. The bill would require new agreements with license plate camera suppliers mandate that no default access is provided to any national database and that an agency’s collected scans are by default not accessible to any other agency.
Watsonville currently has 20 cameras, Capitola has 10 and Santa Cruz has eight. Barraza said that when she learned about these cameras, the disparity, which would increase if the council approves the expanded contract, caught her attention and she worries the data will be misused to target her community.
“I’m sure the way it was sold to the City Council was like, ‘Look at all the good things it has done,'” Barraza said. “In this case, it looks like the bad outweighs the good.”
In addition to removing the agenda item from the City Council, Barraza and Get the Flock Out want to increase public awareness of the cameras and the controversy surrounding them.
“I feel like we’re trading our civil liberties for a false sense of security,” she said.
When the Watsonville City Council was set to vote on license plate cameras in May 2023, Watsonville police Capt. Donny Thul said the technology would allow for more expedient crime solving.
“Technology has become a crucial component to rapid crime solvability rates,” he said. “The use of surveillance cameras at a business may have captured the license plate of a suspect vehicle leaving the scene of a crime, but maybe that information is not readily available for days or even longer. We have a unique opportunity for Flock Safety automated license plate reader technology to have this type of information within minutes.”
© 2025 the Santa Cruz Sentinel (Scotts Valley, Calif.). Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
