At a meeting of the Alameda County Board of Supervisors on June 30, 2026, the Alameda County Sheriff’s Office stated that an audit from May 2025 to May 2026 found 140 unauthorized searches of their license plate reader data. As a result of these unauthorized searches, the Alameda County Sheriff’s Office stopped sharing with two agencies and is now conducting weekly audits of its license plate reader program.
During a staff presentation on consolidation of contracts with Flock Safety for license plate readers, pan-tilt-zoom surveillance cameras and drones, Sergeant Fenton Culley at first didn’t name the agencies, which were later identified as the Northern California Regional Intelligence Center (NCRIC) and the Western States Information Network (WSIN) by Alameda County Sheriff Yesenia Sanchez. NCRIC is a fusion center covering most of northern California and WSIN is a private organization for sharing law enforcement data in Alaska, California, Hawaii, Oregon, Washington, Canada, Guam, and New Zealand.
In addition to cutting off sharing of license plate reader data to NCRIC and WSIN, Sergeant Culley reported that the Alameda County Sheriff’s Office reduced the number of agencies with which it shares Flock license plate reader data from 346 to 123. A review of the agencies with which the Alameda County Sheriff’s Office shares license plate reader data at its transparency portal showed a total of 122 agencies, most of which were located in the Bay Area or at the state level, like the California Highway Patrol, Department of Corrections, State Parks, and Department of Fish and Wildlife.
The revelation follows a pattern in which law enforcement agencies are discovering that their license plate reader data has been shared in violation of a California state law enacted in 2016 that prohibits sharding of license plate reader data with out-of-state and federal agencies. The San Francisco Standard reported on June 18, 2026, that hundreds of illegal searches of the San Francisco Police Department’s license plate reader data were conducted over a year through NCRIC. Like the Alameda County Sheriff’s Office, San Francisco also stopped sharing license plate reader data with NCRIC and WSIN.
Details of the meeting were also reported in The Oaklandside.
If similar audits are conducted of other law enforcement agencies’ license plate reader programs, we expect more of this illegal sharing to be discovered.