San Francisco Police | License plate readers

The size of it

The department’s own report to the Board of Supervisors, filed in October 2024, gives the number: “The department currently has approximately 300 ALPR cameras not including mobile. Total deployment is expected to be 400.”

Three vendors run them, named in the report as “Flock ALPR, Motorla/Vigilant ALPR, ThomsonReuters Clear ALPR.” The misspelling is the department’s. A Neology camera was replaced.

The money is in the same document. For financial year 2024-2025 the department reports $350,000 in one-time installation costs and $1.2 million in annual recurring software costs, “funded entirely through State of California retail theft grant.”

Where the data lives, and who decides how long

The policy the Board approved in December 2023 sets retention by pointing at another organization:

SFPD defers to the NCRIC retention standard: ALPR records are maintained for 12 months from capture. If a record is connected to a criminal investigation or criminal intelligence file it may be retained for 5 years.

NCRIC is the Northern California Regional Intelligence Center. The policy also records that NCRIC “and/or any other vendor utilized by the Department may host the ALPR data repositories,” reached through software called BOSS.

So the plates San Francisco collects sit in a regional intelligence centre’s repository, kept for a period that centre’s standard sets. That is a description, not an accusation, and it is worth knowing.

Two hundred and thirty agencies

The most useful page in the 2024 report is the list at question 9.5, which names every non-city entity that received the department’s plate data. It runs to roughly 230 California law enforcement agencies, and it includes NCRIC.

Every entry carries a California designation, which is what Civil Code section 1798.90.55 requires and what the department’s own policy says it will do.

The list reaches most of the state. It names agencies in counties documented elsewhere on this site, from Napa and Sonoma to Butte, Merced, Placer and San Joaquin, along with neighbours across the bay and down the peninsula.

What that list is: evidence of the shape of the network, published by one end of it. What it is not: evidence of what any receiving agency searched for, or why. Nothing here says anything about the conduct of any agency on it.

Three answers on one form

The annual report is a questionnaire, and three of its answers sit close together.

Question 11.1 asks whether the department received any complaints or concerns from community members about the technology. The answer is No.

Question 12.1 asks whether there were any violations of the policy or the impact report, “reported through community members, non-privileged internal audits, or through other means in the last year.” The answer is No.

Question 12.4 asks whether the department conducted any internal audits of the technology. The answer is No.

Those are the department’s own answers, on the form the ordinance requires. We are not going to tell you what to make of them, and we are not suggesting anyone is hiding anything. The reporting mechanism asks a department to report violations, and one of the routes by which violations would surface is a route the department reports not having used that year. That is a fact about how the arrangement works.

What officers may not do

The policy contains real limits, written down, and they belong on this page next to everything else.

“Officers shall not stop a vehicle solely based on an ALPR alert.” Before a stop on a stolen or felony want, the officer has to read the plate characters visually and confirm through the state law-enforcement network, or another source, that the plate is actually listed.

The policy goes further and names the alert types that are not grounds for a stop at all:

Other ALPR alerts (e.g. 852 “auto boost”, 459 “burglary”, 10-43 “of interest to special investigation”, etc.) do not provide officers with justification to conduct a traffic stop or detain a vehicle and the occupants. Sufficient probable cause has not been established to stop a “vehicle of interest” that is the focus of a criminal investigation.

A department writing down which of its own alerts do not justify pulling someone over is doing something most policies on this site do not.

The count is public, the map is not

Five of the seven public records requests the department received that year asked where the cameras are.

The department’s answer, in its own words, is that it “has asserted all privileges available by law to maintain confidentiality as to the compiled ALPR map depicting the location of all installed ALPR cameras,” on the ground that the map “is a record of security and intelligence information that is protected under Cal. Govt. Code section 7923.600(a).”

It disclosed other things instead: a presentation about how cameras are funded and placed, a department notice about the Flock rollout, and the policy itself. So the number of cameras is public, the fact of the map is public, the exemption relied on is public, and the locations are not.