Lassen County Sheriff | License plate readers

A bid award

On 8 October 2024 the Lassen County Board of Supervisors was asked to do something that sounds ordinary and, on this site, is not:

Award the bid to Flock Group Inc., in the amount of $98,950 for thirteen (13) fixed automated license plate readers (ALPR)

It passed, on a motion by Supervisor Bridges seconded by Supervisor Gallagher.

The reason that first word matters is a comparison. Lake County, documented here on the same day, brought four plate reader items to its board between 2021 and 2024. Three of them opened by asking the board to waive the formal bidding process, on the grounds that the goods were unique.

Neither route is unlawful, and sole-source procurement exists in every county’s purchasing code for good reasons. The difference is what comes out of it. A bid produces a number somebody else was asked to beat. A waiver produces a number the seller named.

We do not know what the competing bids were here, or whether there were any. That is the first thing worth asking this county for, because if the file contains competing prices it is the only benchmark on this site for what these systems cost when a vendor has company.

Nobody in Lassen County paid for this

From the memo:

This purchase will be 100% grant funded and has no impact to existing budgets. The grant source is the Homeland Security Grant Program.

That is federal money, and on this site it has stopped being remarkable. Humboldt’s nine cameras came from a Byrne JAG grant and a Homeland Security grant. Mendocino applied twice to a Department of Justice programme for $300,000 each time. Lassen’s thirteen are Homeland Security, in full.

Four rural California counties, four surveillance systems, and in each case the county’s own ratepayers were told the equipment was free to them.

It is worth being precise about what that does and does not mean. The money is real and it is public; it is simply federal rather than local. What changes is the decision. A board weighing a $98,950 purchase against its own budget is making a trade-off. A board told the purchase costs it nothing is making a different kind of decision, and the case for saying no has to come from somewhere other than the ledger.

What the board was told about the product

The memo’s description of the system is substantially the vendor’s, including a trademark symbol:

Their unique Vehicle Fingerprint™ machine learning model transforms hours of footage into actionable evidence, identifying vehicles by make, color, type, and even unique identifiers such as decals, bumper stickers, and accessories.

And two of its sentences pass on the company’s commitments as settled fact:

The agency owns 100% of the data. Flock will never share or sell the customer’s data.

There is nothing improper in this and this page does not suggest there is. A small county’s emergency services chief, briefing a board on a product he is asking to buy, will reasonably use the seller’s material, and the memo is published in the agenda packet where anyone can read it and see where the language comes from.

What is worth naming is that it keeps happening. This is the fourth agency documented on this site whose official account of a plate reader programme reproduces the seller’s description of it, after a sheriff’s policy manual in Humboldt, a sheriff’s public webpage in Mendocino and a city statement in Ukiah. No one of those is notable. Four is a pattern in how these systems get explained to the people approving them.

The sentence that answers a different question

“Flock will never share or sell the customer’s data” is a real commitment and there is no reason to doubt it.

It is also not an answer to the question people actually have, which is whether some other police department can search this county’s cameras. Those are two different mechanisms. Sharing is the vendor handing data to a third party. Access is another of the vendor’s customers running a query against a network that includes these thirteen cameras.

The Attorney General’s 2023 guidance to every law enforcement agency in California addresses exactly the second one, and says the prohibition on out-of-state and federal sharing reaches databases accessed through vendors. The state’s pending case against El Cajon is about that mechanism too, and its evidence is a vendor page listing which agencies could search a California city’s data.

Nothing in what Lassen’s board was given addresses it, and nothing we read establishes how this county’s system is configured. It is an open question here, not an accusation.