San Diego County

This is a partial account of a very large county, and that belongs at the top rather than in a footnote. San Diego is the second most populous county in California. What follows documents one police department in it, because that is where the only plate reader enforcement action in the state currently sits.

In October 2025 the Attorney General of California sued the City of El Cajon, its police department and its police chief, asking the San Diego County Superior Court to declare that sharing plate reader data with agencies outside California is unlawful and to order it stopped. The case is 25CU053437C. It has not been decided, the city disputes the state’s reading, and everything the state asserts is an allegation.

The dispute is about two words. California’s statute lets an agency share plate data with “another public agency”. The state says that means a California agency and nothing else. El Cajon says otherwise. A statute whose meaning two sets of government lawyers argue about in open court is not a simple one, and a judge will settle it.

Two things in the case reach past this county.

The first is where the state got its evidence. It did not need a subpoena. The petition cites the vendor’s own public transparency page for the department, as it stood on a named date. Agencies in two other counties documented on this site link a page exactly like it as their own answer to how a resident checks what happens to this data. In that sense the page did its job. We could not read it ourselves: the host returns a bot challenge to automated readers and we do not go around those.

The second is a document from two years earlier. In October 2023 the Department of Justice sent every law enforcement agency in California a bulletin explaining that a public agency does not include out-of-state or federal agencies, and that the prohibition reaches databases reached through vendors. Several California policies now carry that reasoning nearly word for word. They did not each work it out. They were sent it, in writing, in 2023.

What is not here is most of San Diego County. The Sheriff’s Office, the San Diego Police Department, the Smart Streetlights programme, the city’s surveillance ordinance, every other city, and the entire Board of Supervisors record are unswept. Two of the relevant websites are behind bot walls and the county’s own site did not answer us at all. None of that is a finding about any of them. It is a statement about how far this pass got.