Bakersfield Police | License plate readers and the real-time centre

What the budget document says

Most of what this site publishes has to be dug out of contracts and records requests. Bakersfield’s police department wrote this one down itself, in the budget presentation it gave its city council on 10 June 2026, in the section listing what the Technology Development unit had accomplished:

Expanded the Police Department’s existing Flock camera network as part of the implementation of the department’s Real Time Information Center, which is currently in progress, to help prevent crime, provide evidence, and improve public safety. There were forty CCTV cameras installed at intersections throughout the city.

And a few pages earlier, under the Crime Analysis Unit:

The Bakersfield PD Real Time Information Center (RTIC) became operational.

A real-time information centre, sometimes called a real-time crime centre, is a staffed room where camera feeds, dispatch data and other sources are watched live and pushed to officers as calls unfold. It is a different kind of thing from a plate reader. A plate reader answers a question about the past: where was this car. A real-time centre answers a question about now.

The four steps

Set the department’s own statements side by side and the assembly is visible.

One. The existing plate reader network was expanded, explicitly “as part of the implementation” of the centre.

Two. Forty CCTV cameras went up at intersections across the city.

Three. Among the goals for the coming year:

In coordination with the City’s Technology Services Department, replace the remaining cameras from the Leverage CCTV system that is to be decommissioned. New cameras will be added to Technology Services’ Ocularis system, making them available as feeds in our Flock system.

Municipal cameras, bought by a city technology department rather than as police plate readers, becoming feeds inside the police camera platform.

Four. A contract schedule in the council’s 11 February 2026 packet buys “Flock to vCAD API Integration Services” for USD 8,000.00 and a year of “Flock to vCAD API” maintenance for USD 4,000.00. vCAD is the computer-aided dispatch system. The cameras and the dispatch floor are being connected to each other.

None of that was hidden. Every one of those lines is in a public document, on a public agenda, available to anyone who reads a city budget. And no one of them was ever an item the public could turn up and argue about on its own terms. They arrived as accomplishments and goals inside a departmental budget presentation, which is where the real decisions in a mid-sized city usually live.

The question the Vice Mayor had to ask

At the end of that same 10 June meeting, the minutes record this:

Vice Mayor Kaur request staff provide additional information on the Flock Camera System, including the number and locations of cameras, data retention logs, and a process for ongoing public updates when the topic is considered by the Safe and Healthy Neighborhoods Committee.

Read it slowly, because it is the most useful sentence in this county’s record.

An elected member of the council that funds this system asked, in open session, for the number of cameras. And their locations. And the retention logs. And a process for telling the public what is going on.

We are not going to tell you why she had to ask, because the minutes do not say and we have not asked her. It does not establish that anyone refused her, or that the information does not exist. What it establishes is narrower and still worth something: on the night the department reported that its real-time centre was operational and its camera network had been expanded to feed it, the count, the locations and the retention logs were not in front of the council.

Two weeks later, at the meeting of 24 June, four members of the public came to the podium to make comments about the use of Flock cameras and privacy. We are not naming them. They are private citizens who spoke at a council meeting, the minutes name them, and their names add nothing their number does not.

What we are not saying

We do not know how many cameras Bakersfield has. Reporting has put the figure around 130, and has described purchases of 21 cameras in 2021 and a $308,700 three-year contract for 37 more in 2023, and a monthly plate-read volume in the hundreds of thousands. We have not verified any of it. The council record for those years is in a document sweep that had not reached them when this page was written, and this site does not publish a number it has not seen in a primary document.

We also do not know how long the data is kept, who else can search it, or whether the department has published the plate reader usage policy state law requires. Those are the questions in the records request on this site.

The county sheriff, whose deputies patrol outside the city limits, publishes its plate reader policy in full and includes a sentence prohibiting the sharing of that data with federal and out-of-state agencies. Whether Bakersfield has anything comparable, in a policy or a contract, is one of the things nobody outside the department currently knows.