Sacramento County Sheriff | License plate readers

What the grand jury was looking for

In 2023 the Sacramento County Grand Jury started with a fact already on the public record: a 2020 state audit had cited this office for sharing plate data outside California. It spent the next seven months asking what safeguards were in place, interviewing department leadership and reading the plate reader policies of six agencies across the county.

Its summary describes the system in terms most residents would not recognise as describing their own commute:

Sacramento County residents are likely unaware that Law Enforcement Agencies (LEAs) - the Sacramento Sheriff’s Office and the city police departments located within the County - operate an intricate network of stationary and mobile cameras tracking their vehicles as they travel.

What it found

The finding against this office is in the past tense, and that is deliberate:

SSO’s practice of sharing ALPR information with out-of-state entities violated SB 34 and unreasonably risked the aiding of potential prosecution by the home-state of women who traveled to California to seek or receive healthcare services.

SB 34, passed in 2015, prohibits a California agency from sharing plate data with any out-of-state agency, including federal ones. The grand jury records that during its investigation the office committed to change course and comply with the Attorney General’s guidance.

Two further findings are about oversight rather than sharing. The office gave the grand jury an internal audit it had run on its own searches, sampling ten searches on each of ten days in 2022. Every search had a case number and a stated reason. The audit then found what the case numbers were worth:

It was noted that many case number entries lacked specificity. Users are able to enter non-case-specific random characters that do not provide any valid or verifiable data.

The audit passed, and the control the audit relied on was the thing that failed. The grand jury also found the audits themselves “are not scheduled or consistent”.

What the published policy still says

California law requires an agency operating plate readers to publish a usage and privacy policy. The document this office publishes is its Automated License Plate Reader Program general order. We fetched it on 25 August 2026. Every page footer reads 10/12 (Rev 4/16).

On how long data is kept, it sets two years, citing the general local records statute rather than any plate reader rule. The grand jury reports the same period independently.

On sharing, the order says this:

All detection data generated from Sheriff’s ALPR systems will be shared with requesting law enforcement agencies who utilize the Law Enforcement Archival Reporting Network (LEARN).

Sharing is the default and using the same network is the qualification. The order sets no geographical limit in that section. It does not mention SB 34, out-of-state agencies or federal agencies anywhere in the document, and we read the whole document.

That is a description of a published file on a given date. It is not a claim about what the office does today. Recommendation R1 asked for an updated policy, conspicuously posted, by 1 October 2024, and the office’s own transparency page says it “is currently in the process of updating many of its policies and procedures” and invites a records request for anything missing. A newer order may exist and simply not be posted. We could not find one, and we are telling you what we looked at rather than what we concluded from not finding it.

What plate readers were credited with

The grand jury put the case for the technology in its own report, and it belongs here too. Citing the legislative analysis of SB 34, it records that in the first thirty days of using the technology this office identified 495 stolen vehicles, five carjacked vehicles and nineteen other vehicles involved in felonies, and that forty-five suspects were taken into custody.

The report puts the limit in the next sentence: “However, the system cannot distinguish between cars used in criminal activities and those operated legally.”

That is the trade in one line, made by the body that investigated it.

Who has to answer

The grand jury required a written response from the Sheriff, an elected official, within sixty days, covering four of its five findings and four of its five recommendations. Under state law that response must say, point by point, whether he agrees, and for each recommendation whether it has been implemented, will be implemented, requires further analysis, or will not be implemented and why.

We have not read it. It is the single document that would turn this page from an account of what was found into an account of what changed.