Hollister Police | Gunshot detection and plate readers

What the resolution is called, and what it buys

On 21 August 2023 the Hollister City Council passed Resolution No. 2023-163. Its title, in full:

A RESOLUTION OF THE CITY COUNCIL OF THE CITY OF HOLLISTER AUTHORIZING THE MAYOR TO SIGN THE AGREEMENT WITH FLOCK GROUP, INC. FOR GUNSHOT DETECTION SERVICES

The resolution has four recital clauses and one operative clause. Every one of them describes gunshot detection. None mentions licence plate readers.

The agreement it authorises includes up to fifteen of them.

That is not hidden. One line below the title, the agenda’s own brief description says the agreement is “to provide gunshot detection and license plate reading cameras for an area of about one square mile of Hollister.” Anyone reading the item saw both. The point is narrower and it is about what survives. A resolution is the thing that gets numbered, indexed, minuted and searched years later. This one, read on its own, describes half of what the city bought.

The plate readers were a reason for the choice

The staff report by Police Chief Carlos Reynoso explains how Flock was selected. Two companies had presented to the council: ShotSpotter and Flock Safety.

The Council provided direction to staff to pursue an agreement with Flock Safety for several reasons. One of the reasons was the ability of Flock Safety to also incorporate up to 15 license plate reading cameras along with their RAVEN gunshot detection system.

So the plate readers were not a bundled extra nobody focused on. They were part of why this vendor won. The council knew, and the record shows the council knew.

The cost, and the minute of public comment

The staff report gives the figures plainly: “a cost of $93,500 for the first year and $80,000 for the second year.” The money was already in the approved 2023-2024 police budget, so the vote authorised a signature rather than an appropriation. Flock was recorded as a sole source provider, the only company selling the RAVEN system.

The minutes record what happened in the room:

Police Chief Reynoso provided the staff report. Mayor Casey opened public comment at 9:20 p.m. There were no speakers for this item. Mayor Casey closed public comment at 9:20 p.m.

Both times read 9.20pm. Nobody came to the podium. The item passed four votes to none, with one council member absent.

We are not going to make that mean more than it does. It was late on a Monday, the item was the second-to-last piece of business, and no law or rule was bent. A council that holds a public hearing nobody attends has still held a public hearing. But this is how most surveillance gets bought in most towns: correctly, in public, in about a minute, because the people it will watch were not in the room and mostly did not know the item existed.

The part that grows on its own

One paragraph of the staff report describes something worth understanding, because it changes what the fifteen-camera figure means:

Additionally, the FLOCK Safety system allows for private individuals, schools and HOA’s to purchase their own FLOCK systems. FLOCK Safety will incorporate those devices purchased in the community by other resources to the city and essentially expand the crime fighting and crime investigating resource to the police department.

The council authorised up to fifteen cameras. It did not authorise a ceiling. Every camera a resident, a school or a homeowners’ association buys afterwards can be added to what the department searches, and none of those purchases returns to the council for a vote.

This is not unique to Hollister, and that is the reason to point at it rather than at the city. The same arrangement appears one range of hills east, in Tulare County. Visalia’s police department records in its own training bulletin that it has been granted access to twenty-four Flock cameras owned by other organisations in that city, against eleven it had installed itself. That page on this site carries the document. The public decision sets a floor. The private market sets the actual size.

At the same meeting, a council member asked staff to partner with local schools to install more cameras. Whether that happened, we do not know.

What we do not know

Quite a lot, and the gaps are specific.

The staff report told the council the system “will be evaluated each year to document the effectiveness of the system in Hollister”. A report was to go back to the council on whether to terminate, extend or expand it. The two-year term ran to 2025. We have found no evaluation, no renewal, and no termination. Our record of this council does not reach them.

No document we read says how long the plate reads are kept, how long the audio is kept, who may search either, or whether anything is shared with other agencies. California law requires an agency operating plate readers to publish a usage policy. We looked on the city’s website in August 2026 and could not find one. That is a statement about our search, not a finding that no policy exists.

And this page is about the City of Hollister only. San Benito County’s own website refuses automated requests, and the Board of Supervisors publishes through a portal that turns us away, so we have swept neither. Whether the Sheriff’s Office operates any of this is something we simply have not looked at, which is different from having looked and found nothing.