Cotati Police | License plate readers

A retention period that keeps going down

Most of the plate reader records on this site describe systems growing. Cotati’s describes one being trimmed, twice, by the people elected to oversee it.

The city’s council had already directed that plate data be kept for six months instead of a year. The staff report explains what that was for: the council wanted “to determine if 6 months was in fact the optimal retention period or if a shorter period would still effectively accomplish the public safety purpose.”

In May 2025 the Chief of Police came back and recommended going further, to one month, on the ground that it “will still provide sufficient information to assist in solving the vast majority of crimes, while balancing the data privacy concerns as well as the costs to the City for retaining this data for longer periods of time.”

The council approved it, five votes to nil.

One year, then six months, then one month. Each step asked for in public, at a meeting anyone could attend.

The cost pointed the same way

It is worth being straight about something the report says plainly. The shorter retention was also the cheaper option: “Longer data retention significantly increases the annual costs and is not recommended.”

Privacy and money pointed in the same direction here. That does not undo the council having asked the question first, in March, before anyone costed anything. It does mean the decision was not made against a competing interest, which is easier than the cases where it is.

What the city actually has

Four patrol cars. That is it.

The staff report is unusually plain about the starting position: “The City currently has four patrol vehicles upfitted with Axon dash-cameras that have ALPR capabilities. Currently, there are no fixed ALPR cameras and data sharing with neighboring law enforcement agencies is not enabled.”

No fixed cameras. No sharing.

The other half of the same vote

The motion that cut retention also opened the city’s data up, and brought its first fixed cameras in.

The report recommends “1 to 1 data sharing with other California law enforcement agencies and be able to receive data from public ALPRs.” The mechanism is a subscription, and the price is specific: “a two year service contract at $6,000 per year that also includes 2 fixed ALPRs.”

So a city with no fixed plate readers approved a package that includes two, in the same motion that cut how long it keeps what they record. Both halves were on the agenda, both were in the staff report, and both were approved together. Neither is hidden. They simply run in different directions, and a reader deserves to see both.

The cameras it wants to reach

The report names what the department expects access to: “the ALPR cameras at Lowe’s Home Improvement, the 101 freeway, 116 highway/Stony Point, Rohnert Park, Petaluma, Santa Rosa, and other cameras in Sonoma County jurisdictions.” It adds that Sonoma State University “is in the process of installing ALPR cameras.”

That list is a useful picture of what a small department’s plate reader horizon looks like. It is not four cars any more. It is four cars plus whatever the freeway, the neighbouring cities, the university and a hardware store’s car park can see.

We know nothing else about the Lowe’s cameras, and we are not going to guess. A camera tagged with the same operator turns up in Tuolumne County, four hours away.

How this reached a vote

The path is worth tracing, because it is the one this site keeps telling readers to use.

In March 2025 the Police Chief gave the council his annual report on the previous year. During it, the council started asking about how long plate data is kept. The report records what happened next: “the City Council requested that staff return with an agendized item to discuss the topic in more detail.”

Two months later that item was on the agenda, with a staff report, a presentation, and a vote.

An annual report, a question from the dais, an agenda item, a decision. It took two months in a city of seven and a half thousand people.

How we nearly missed all of this

This page exists because a Cotati resident sent us the minutes.

Our own sweep of Sonoma County recorded the wrong platform for this council, on a hostname that the city’s website never links, behind a robots file that told our fetcher to stay out. The item title leads with the first term in our keyword list. We would have found it instantly, if we had been looking in the right place.

The full account of what went wrong is in our research files, and the rule it produced is now in the playbook. We are recording it here too, because a site that publishes what agencies missed should be straightforward about what it missed itself.