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Rocklin Police | License plate readers

In a November 2022 records response, Rocklin Police said its reader data sits in Rekor's cloud, is kept 90 days, is not shared with any outside agency, and is not checked against hot lists. The department logged 3,466,285 detections in the 90 days before the response.

At a glance

Vendor (2022)
Rekor, cloud hosted [1]
Retention (2022)
90 days [1]
Sharing (2022)
"Rocklin PD does not share any ALPR data with outside agencies or organizations" [1]
Hot lists (2022)
Not used [1]
Detections in the prior 90 days (2022)
3,466,285 [1]
Status since 2022
not in any record we fetched; a 2023 Sheriff memo lists Rocklin among Flock Safety users, which may indicate a later change [2]

How it happened

  1. Context

    Records response on the reader program

    Answering a public records request, the department wrote that "currently Rocklin PD does not share any ALPR data with outside agencies or organizations," that it "does not utilize "hot lists"," that "The data is stored remotely, via Rekor which is cloud based," and that it keeps data 90 days. [1]

  2. Context

    Named as a Flock user in a Sheriff memo

    The Placer County Sheriff's memo on the county's own Flock agreement lists Rocklin among police departments where the Flock camera is "currently utilized". [2]

What the record establishes

Rocklin Police Department answered a California Public Records Act request on November 15, 2022. On sharing it wrote: “currently Rocklin PD does not share any ALPR data with outside agencies or organizations,” and it “does not receive APLR data from outside agencies or organizations.” On hot lists: “currently Rocklin PD does not utilize :hot lists"" (as written). On storage: “The data is stored remotely, via Rekor which is cloud based.” On retention: “Rocklin PD has 90 day retention for ALPR data. In the past 90 days, Rocklin PD has had 3,466,285 “detections”.”[1]

What it does not establish

Those answers are dated 2022. The Sheriff’s memo of March 28, 2023 lists Rocklin among departments where the Flock Safety camera is “currently utilized,” which may indicate a second vendor or a change.[2] We could not find a Rocklin policy page, a contract or a council item in the records we fetched on this pass; the city’s older document links did not resolve.

Questions

Does Rocklin share its license plate data?
In November 2022 the department wrote that it "does not share any ALPR data with outside agencies or organizations" and does not receive data from others. Whether that is still true is not in any record we fetched. [1]
Which vendor does Rocklin use?
The 2022 response says data "is stored remotely, via Rekor which is cloud based." A March 2023 Sheriff memo lists Rocklin among departments using Flock Safety cameras. The two records are four months apart; we could not find a later Rocklin record to reconcile them. [1] [2]

On the map

The community has mapped 248 devices of this type in the county on OpenStreetMap. These are community reports: the vendor and operator of each point are unverified, and none is confirmed to belong to this system. See them on the map →

Street names from reverse geocoding — © OpenStreetMap contributors (ODbL).

What we do not know

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 Placer County.

What we have documented in Placer 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. 1.
    MuckRock, Automated License Plate Readers (Rocklin Police Department), request filed 2022-11-03, response 2022-11-15 · Primary document · · accessed · archived copy
  2. 2.
    Placer County Sheriff's Office memo to the Board of Supervisors, item 24B, Flock Group Inc. Agreement, March 28, 2023 · Meeting record · · accessed · archived copy

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