Bishop PD | License plate readers
The first body on this site that had these cameras installed and voted to switch them off. Three votes to two, after two hours of public comment.
At a glance
- What happened
- "The City of Bishop terminated a five-year contract with Flock Safety Monday after residents raised concern about privacy violations and data searches" [1]
- The vote
- "a rare split 3-2 decision", to "immediately kill" the contract [1]
- When
- June 2026. The report is dated 25 June 2026 and describes the vote as taken on the Monday [1]
- How long the council spent on it
- "about two hours" of public comment and discussion [1]
- What the council weighed
- "the impact on community safety, the potential for increased vandalism, especially as the new City Park Master Plan is implemented, and the need for a new AI policy, along with the privacy rights and data sharing concerns expressed by residents" [1]
- The council record
- not read. The city publishes through a host whose robots file closes it to automated readers, so this page rests on reporting rather than on the minutes [1]
- How many cameras there were, and what they cost
- not established. Neither figure appears in the part of the reporting we could read [1]
- When they were installed
- not established. One weak source describes installation beginning in December 2024 and we do not publish it as a date [1]
How it happened
- Denied
The council terminates the contract
After about two hours of public comment and discussion, the Bishop City Council voted three to two to immediately end a five-year contract with Flock Safety. Reported by the Inyo Register on 25 June 2026. The minutes have not been read. [1]
Read this first
We have not read the minutes. The City of Bishop publishes its council record through a host whose robots file closes it to automated readers, and the newspaper that covered the vote is paywalled after its opening paragraphs. Everything below comes from those paragraphs.
That is a thinner record than this site prefers for a page, and it is published anyway for a reason given at the end.
What the paper reported
The City of Bishop terminated a five-year contract with Flock Safety Monday after residents raised concern about privacy violations and data searches.
In a rare split 3-2 decision, the Bishop City Council at its meeting Monday voted to immediately kill a contract with Flock Safety after hearing from the public and discussing the pros and cons of the automated license plate reading system for about two hours.
And on what the council weighed:
During deliberations, council members considered the impact on community safety, the potential for increased vandalism, especially as the new City Park Master Plan is implemented, and the need for a new AI policy, along with the privacy rights and data sharing concerns expressed by residents at the meeting.
Why this page exists
Because across every county researched on this site, this is the first one.
Cities have declined to buy these cameras. Eureka’s council refused a proposal for twenty-one of them in February 2025, unanimously, and that is documented here. Counties have argued about them: Humboldt’s supervisors took five motions on the subject in a single sitting and passed the two that added oversight.
Bishop is different in a specific way. The contract existed. The cameras were installed. The council voted to end it immediately, and the vote was close.
That matters because the two situations are not the same decision. Refusing a purchase is a choice about the future, made before anything has been built, by a body that has not yet been told the system is working. Ending a contract means overriding a department that has a system in operation, accepting whatever was spent, and being the council that turned something off. It is a harder vote, and three people out of five took it.
What that list of considerations shows
The paper’s account of the deliberation is the most useful sentence in it, because of what is in the list.
Community safety. Vandalism, tied to a specific park plan. The need for a new AI policy. Privacy rights. Data sharing.
That is not a council voting on a slogan. It is a council weighing a public safety argument against a privacy argument, noticing that it has no policy for a category of technology it is now dealing with, and worrying about a concrete local consequence. Whichever way a reader thinks it should have gone, that is the deliberation working.
What we do not know
Almost everything else. How many cameras there were. Where. What the five-year contract cost, and what ending it cost. What the police department said. What happened to the hardware. Whether the AI policy was ever drafted.
All of it is in a council record that a person with a browser can open and our tooling cannot, and it is the first item on this county’s retrieval list.
What we do not know
- What the minutes record, including how each council member voted. The city's council record is on a host closed to our tooling.
- How many cameras there were, where they were, and what the five-year contract cost.
- Whether the city drafted the AI policy its council discussed while deliberating.
- What the police department said in response, and what happened to the cameras themselves.
What you can do
Show up
Systems like this one are approved by boards, councils and committees that meet in public. We have not yet confirmed where each of them meets in Inyo County.
What we have documented in Inyo County →Protect yourself
Practical steps to shrink your personal data trail. Our guides publish at launch; until then, EFF's Surveillance Self-Defense is the best starting point.
Surveillance Self-Defense →Sources
- 1.
Get the digest
A regular digest of what changed in the world of surveillance: the counties we published, the devices that appeared on the map, and the public meetings where these decisions get made. We send it when there is enough to report.
One click to unsubscribe. What we do with your address is on the newsletter page.