Ukiah PD | License plate readers

An archive nobody else keeps

The Ukiah Police Department publishes its policy manual. So do plenty of agencies on this site.

What this department does that no other one here does is keep the old ones. Seventeen previous versions sit on its transparency page under a heading that says so, going back to a manual released in July 2013, each one downloadable, alongside the current manual and one interim release.

That turns a question this site usually cannot answer into one that takes an afternoon. Not what does the rule say, but what did the rule used to say.

What changed

Two provisions in the plate reader policy are different now from what they were on 29 October 2025, and both changed in the direction of the stricter rule.

Retention. Every published version from March 2023 through October 2025 says the same thing: data “should be stored for a minimum of one year”. The version released on 10 March 2026 says:

All ALPR data downloaded to the server should be stored for 30 days.

A minimum of one year became a maximum of thirty days. For a resident whose car passes one of these cameras, that is the difference between a record of their movements sitting in a database for twelve months and it sitting there for one.

Sharing. The older versions carried the short form:

The ALPR data may be shared only with other law enforcement or prosecutorial agencies for official law enforcement purposes or as otherwise permitted by law

The current version carries the long one:

The ALPR data may be shared only with public agencies and only as otherwise permitted by law (Civil Code § 1798.90.55).

For purposes of this section, a public agency is limited to California state or local agencies, including law enforcement agencies, and does not include out-of-state or federal law enforcement agencies (Civil Code § 1798.90.5).

State law said this all along. What changed is that the department’s own rulebook now says it, in the place an officer or a resident would look.

And one change that goes the other way

The same revision altered how another agency asks for data. The older policy said the requesting agency “makes a written request”. The current one says it “makes a written request or digital request through the Flock Safety database”.

That is not a loosening of the rule. The same three pieces of information are still required, the same commander still has to approve it, and the approved request is still kept on file.

It is a change in where the paperwork lives. The channel through which one agency asks another for plate data now runs through the vendor’s own system. Whether that makes the trail easier or harder to audit depends entirely on what the vendor’s system records and who can see it, and the policy does not say.

What the city told residents, three days later

On 13 March 2026 the City of Ukiah published a page headed “A Message to Our Community”. It opens by naming the subject directly:

We know there have been questions — locally and statewide — about how cities handle immigration issues and data sharing.

It then states the commitment plainly:

The Ukiah Police Department does not share Flock camera data with federal agencies or agencies outside of California.

and:

The City of Ukiah does not use local resources for federal immigration enforcement, except as required by California law under the California Values Act (SB 54).

The Lexipol release line on the revised policy is 10 March 2026. The statement is dated 13 March 2026. We are recording that sequence and nothing else. We do not know which came first in practice, whether either prompted the other, or what discussion produced them, because no document we read says so. The revision record is on this county’s records request.

What is still missing

The count. The city’s page describes what the cameras do and links a transparency portal, and it never says how many there are. The policy does not either. The only figure we found anywhere is 14, and it comes from an opinion column, which is the weakest kind of source this project uses. We are citing it as exactly that.

The contract, and the vote. We found no council item approving a Flock Safety agreement. That is a gap in our sweep rather than a claim about the city: we could not identify the council’s agenda platform at all, so we never got to look in the right place. Finding it is on this county’s retrieval list.

The portal itself. The city’s statement says the department “maintains a public transparency portal so residents can see exactly which agencies data is shared with”, which is precisely the fact neither policy settles. The portal is hosted by the vendor and returns a bot challenge to automated readers, so we did not read it. A person with a browser can.