The Alameda County Board of Supervisors will convene on April 21 to continue discussing a retroactive contract extension with Flock Safety, a Georgia-based manufacturer of automated license plate readers and cameras. An approval of the extension would allocate an additional $303,600 to Flock for the use of surveillance technology until June 30.
The fixed cameras livestream and record video, storing data of rear license plates and identifying “human presence without recognizing personal characteristics” with the help of artificial intelligence, according to Flock’s product website. Local government agencies and private entities can purchase the cameras with sole operating rights.
The Oakland, Alameda, and Berkeley police departments have contracts with Flock for the purchase of and continued use of license plate readers. According to the Oakland Police Department’s (OPD) Flock Transparency Portal, there are currently 293 Flock cameras owned by the department in Oakland.
Cameras around Peralta
The Citizen used DeFlock, an open source program that maps license plate readers across the United States, to locate the nearest automated license plate readers within an approximate one mile radius of the four Peralta Colleges and independently map them.
Here’s what we found.
You can use the map below to locate where each of the nearest cameras are compared to the four Peralta colleges. The data only includes Flock cameras registered in DeFlock’s database. Each map shows the nearest Flock cameras to each Peralta College campus within a distance of 500 feet.
What are Flock cameras?
Flock offers two kinds of surveillance cameras.
According to the company’s website, the License Plate Reader (LPR) Flock Camera captures “accurate” license plates from vehicles. Subscribers can receive “real-time alerts and rich vehicle details.”
The LRP cameras can be identified by their black hardware; they are smaller than the Flock video camera and are powered by solar energy. LRP Flock cameras also identify vehicle color and make.
Surveillance footage and data exist on the Flock Operating System, a cloud-based platform, for 30 days while the camera itself only stores footage and data for seven days. Flock uses Amazon Web Services, a cloud-based computing platform, to encrypt and secure that data.
Flock across Northern California
Senate Bill 34 is a state law that prohibits local law enforcement agencies from sharing data collected by license plate reader data out of state. The San Francisco Standard reported in July 2025 that at least seven federal agencies had accessed Oakland’s Flock data.
On April 3, Oakland-based law firm Gibbs Mura filed an amended class action lawsuit in San Francisco’s superior court against Flock for allegedly using its cameras to track Californians’ daily movements and share its collected data with out-of-state law enforcement agencies.
Santa Cruz and Los Altos terminated their contracts with Flock in Jan. of this year, making them two of the first Northern California cities to cancel their contracts with the surveillance company.
The Mountain View Police Department shut off their Flock cameras on Feb. 2, following their discovery earlier this year that federal law enforcement agencies had accessed the cameras data in 2024. Mountain View city council made the decision to cancel their contract with Flock on Feb. 24.
Three San José residents filed a federal class action lawsuit to challenge the city’s use of Flock cameras on April 15 against the city, the police department, and Chief of Police for a violation of their Fourth Amendment rights, which protects people from unreasonable search and seizure.
