Skip to content
ORWELL INDEX
Active Updated

Riverside County Sheriff | License plate readers

A policy that requires a case number on every search, forbids private hot lists, and shuts federal agencies out of the network. It also sets no retention period at all, deferring to a service agreement nobody outside the department has seen.

At a glance

Policy
Department Standards Manual 412, "Automated License Plate Readers". Lexipol copyright line dated 11 April 2024 [1]
Suspicion required to run a search
None. "Reasonable suspicion or probable cause is not required before using an ALPR system" [1]
Justification required to run a search
Yes. A specific plate search needs a related case number; a generic vehicle description search needs a justification description or a case number [1]
Private hot lists
Forbidden. Every custom hot list must include the creator's supervisor or a supervisor tasked with ALPR audits [1]
Audits
Monthly, run by the station or bureau over its own personnel's queries and hot lists [1]
Federal agency access to the network
Excluded. Network access may be shared with other law enforcement agencies "excluding federal law enforcement agencies" [1]
Releasing the data to another agency
Permitted to law enforcement or prosecutorial agencies with a nexus, on a written request naming the agency, the requester and the purpose, approved by the affected commander and kept on file. No geographic limit is stated in this sentence [1]
Public access to the data
None. The policy says it "may not be open to public review" [1]
Integration with facial recognition
Contemplated, not recorded. The policy says such systems "may be considered"; nothing read establishes a deployment [1]
Retention of plate reads
no period is set. The policy defers to "applicable service agreements" and no number appears anywhere in the document [1]
How many cameras, and where
not published. The department gives no count in any document we found [1] [2]
Vendor
Flock Safety. The department links a Flock transparency portal from its own Transparency page [2] [3]
Flock transparency portal
Published at transparency.flocksafety.com/riverside-county-ca-sd, and the first one confirmed on this site [2] [3]
Which body approved the network, when, and at what cost
unswept. The Clerk of the Board answers a Cloudflare challenge and the proceedings host serves no readable robots.txt [1]

How it happened

  1. Debate

    The public comment meeting the statute requires

    The department records that it provided the public comment opportunity Civil Code section 1798.90.55(a) requires, at an open meeting of the Board of Supervisors, agenda item 3.108. We have this from the policy's own account; the agenda item itself is behind hosts we could not read. [1]

  2. Context

    An earlier directive, since rescinded

    Department Directive #18-132 governed plate readers until policy 412 replaced it. The directive is not published and we have not read it, so what changed between the two is unknown. [1]

  3. Context

    The current policy

    The copyright line on every page of policy 412 carries this date. The policy requires a case number or written justification on every search, forbids hot lists visible only to their creator, puts monthly query audits on the stations, and excludes federal law enforcement agencies from access to the department's networks. [1]

A policy worth reading closely

Most plate reader policies this project has read say a version of the same thing: use it for law enforcement purposes, log your queries, do not misuse it. Riverside’s says more than that, and three of its provisions are better than the norm.

The first is about what a deputy has to type to run a search:

(d) When conducting a specific license plate search of ALPR data, department members shall include a related case number for justification.

(e) When conducting a generic vehicle description search of ALPR data, department members shall include a justification description or related case number.

California law already requires the purpose of every query to be recorded. This policy goes further and says what an acceptable entry looks like, which is the difference between a field that gets filled in and a field that gets filled in with something checkable.

The second is about hot lists, the user-created watch lists that turn a passive camera network into an alerting one:

(b) No user shall create a Custom Hot List accessible only to themselves. At minimum, each Custom Hot List shall include the creator’s supervisor or any other supervisor tasked with ALPR usage audits.

A deputy cannot put a car on a watch list that only they can see. That closes a specific and obvious route to misuse, and no other policy documented on this site addresses it directly.

The third is about who else gets in:

At the discretion of the Support Services Chief Deputy, access to ALPR networks owned or managed by the Riverside County Sheriff’s Department may be shared with other law enforcement agencies as authorized by law, excluding federal law enforcement agencies.

That exclusion is the thing California’s Attorney General has been telling agencies since 2023, and plenty of sheriff’s manuals still do not carry it.

The sentence immediately after it

The next paragraph covers something different, and the difference matters:

ALPR data may be released to other law enforcement or prosecutorial agencies with a nexus for official law enforcement purposes, or as otherwise permitted by law.

The first sentence is about access to the network. The second is about release of the data. The federal exclusion appears in the first and not the second.

The release procedure is a real check: a written request naming the agency, the person asking and the purpose, reviewed and approved by the affected commander before anything is handed over, with the approved request kept on file. That is more process than most agencies require. It is also, read plainly, a procedure with no geographic limit written into it.

Whether the two sentences are meant to be read together as one rule is not something this page can settle from the text, and we are not going to assert it either way.

What the policy does not say

It does not say how long a plate read is kept.

(b) The Riverside County Sheriff’s Department, or its authorized vendors, will retain raw ALPR information for a period not to exceed the lesser of the maximum period allowed by law, or the retention period established in applicable service agreements.

There is no number anywhere in the six pages. The period is whatever a service agreement says, and that agreement is not published. So the rule that decides how long a record of your car passing a camera survives is not a rule the public can read.

It also does not say how many cameras there are, where they are, who made them, or what they cost.

One line to keep an eye on

The department may elect to integrate ALPR technology with other technology to enhance available information. Systems such as gunshot detection, incident mapping, crime analysis, public safety camera systems, facial recognition, and other video-based analytical systems may be considered based upon availability and the nature of department strategy.

“May be considered” is not a deployment, and nothing else read for this page records one. What it is, is a department writing down that plate readers and face recognition are the same toolkit as far as its own policy is concerned. That is worth knowing before it happens rather than after.

The department publishes a portal, and we cannot read it

One line on the Sheriff’s Transparency page turns out to matter more than the rest of the page put together. It reads “Flock Transparency Portal”, and it points at a page Flock Safety hosts for this department.

Two things follow from the link existing. The vendor is Flock Safety, which the policy never names. And the department has opted in to publishing something about the programme, which is more than most agencies documented here have done.

What is in it, we cannot say. The host answers a Cloudflare challenge, and this project does not go around those. Portals of this kind usually publish the number of cameras, how many searches were run over a recent period, and which agencies the data is shared with. Those are three of this page’s open questions, and one of them is the retention period the policy itself declines to state.

So the honest position is: the answer is probably published, at an address we can give you, and we have not read it. Anyone with a browser can, and it is first on the retrieval list for this county.

Why this page has no purchase record

Three routes lead to this county’s board decisions and none of them opened.

The Clerk of the Board answers a Cloudflare managed challenge, which is a gate rather than a request, and this project does not go around those. The host that serves board proceedings documents returns an error for its own robots.txt, and a robots file we cannot read is not permission, so those documents were left alone. The board’s meeting portal did not answer.

So this page can tell you what the rules are and not what was bought. The department’s own policy names one date that would begin to close the gap, its public comment meeting of 29 August 2017, and that item is first on the retrieval list for this county.

On the map

The community has mapped 2216 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 Riverside County.

What we have documented in Riverside 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.
    Riverside County Sheriff's Department Standards Manual, policy 412, "Automated License Plate Readers" · Primary document · accessed
  2. 2.
    Riverside County Sheriff's Department, Transparency page · Primary document · accessed
  3. 3.
    Flock Safety transparency portal for the Riverside County Sheriff's Department, linked from the department's Transparency page. Not read: the host answers a Cloudflare managed challenge · Primary document · accessed
  4. 4.
    EFF Atlas of Surveillance, entries for the Riverside County Sheriff's Office, snapshot captured 20 August 2026 · Dataset · accessed

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.

Subscribe to the newsletter

One click to unsubscribe. What we do with your address is on the newsletter page.