Does Sacramento have license plate reading tech? What it uses instead of Flock
The short version: The Sacramento Bee digs into whether the city runs Flock cameras and finds ALPR surveillance persists in other forms, with the same sharing risks.
Our Take
Credit to the Sacramento Bee for asking the right first question: not just 'is it Flock?' but 'is my city reading my plates at all?' That distinction matters less than people think. Whether the vendor is Flock Safety, Vigilant, Motorola, or an in-house system, the underlying capability is identical — a network of cameras logging your car's location, time-stamped, searchable, and retained. The brand name on the pole doesn't change what the database can do.
The Bee's reporting also lands on the part of this story that keeps getting buried in local debates about which vendor to pick: California is a sanctuary state, and its own law enforcement agencies have repeatedly funneled ALPR data to ICE and CBP anyway. That's not a hypothetical civil-liberties concern, it's a documented pattern. A city can reject Flock specifically and still be running a system with the same legal exposure, the same retention policies, and the same potential for federal fishing expeditions through local data.
If you live in Sacramento or anywhere else in California, don't let 'we don't use Flock' be the end of the conversation with your city council — ask what system is in place, who can query it, and what the audit trail looks like. Check our camera map to see what's already been documented near you, and use our take-action resources to push for real transparency instead of a vendor name swap.
This is DeFlock The USA’s original commentary. The video above is the work of Sacramento Bee, published on YouTube — full credit to the creator.