Sequoias District Police | Campus license plate readers

A college district with its own plate readers

Community college districts in California can and do run their own sworn police departments, and the Sequoias Community College District runs one. In April 2023 it installed plate readers, and it says so on its own website:

In April 2023, the Sequoias Community College District Police Department installed a total of six ALPR cameras at the Visalia campus, eight on the Tulare campus, and six on the Hanford campus with the goal to help solve and reduce crime.

Twenty cameras. Six, eight and six.

Two things about that sentence are worth pulling out. The first is who is doing it: not a city, not a county, but a college district, whose plate reader network is a third the size of what the Visalia Police Department had installed by January 2025.

The second is where. The Hanford Educational Center is at 925 13th Avenue in Hanford, which is in Kings County. That is a different county, with different agencies, its own sheriff, and its own police department in Hanford whose plate reader programme this site has documented separately. A single college district’s camera network crosses a county line, and neither county’s government approved the half sitting in the other one.

The page is written by the vendor

The district’s page goes on to explain what plate readers are and why they are a good idea. Most of that explanation is not written in the district’s voice. It is written in the vendor’s, in the first person, and left that way. From the section headed “What is Flock Safety?”:

Flock Safety is a public safety operating system that helps cities, businesses, schools, and law enforcement in thousands of communities work together to stop crime, protect privacy, and mitigate bias. We build hardware and write software that captures the objective evidence police need to solve crimes.

“We build hardware.” The company is speaking, on a public agency’s website, about the public agency’s surveillance system, and nothing on the page marks where the district stops and the vendor starts.

We do not know how that happened and we are not going to guess. Vendors supply communications material to their customers constantly, and a small police department with no press officer using what it was given is an ordinary thing rather than a sinister one. But the effect is worth stating, because a reader cannot see it: the document a student would find if they went looking for what the cameras on their campus do is, in substantial part, sales copy.

It carries sales copy’s claims, too. That communities using the system “have reported crime reductions of up to 70%”, with no source. That the technology helps “solve upwards of 5 percent of all reported crime in America”, with no source. That the cameras are “purpose-built to remove human bias from crime solving”. One claim does carry an attribution. “According to the International Association of Chiefs of Police, 7 in 10 crimes are committed with a vehicle” is a claim about vehicles being involved in crimes, not about cameras solving them.

Two sentences about sharing

The part of the page that matters most to anyone parking on these campuses is what happens to the record of their car. The page addresses it twice.

In the district’s own description of its installation:

Each search requires a justification, and the data is never sold or shared with third parties.

And in the general explainer a few sections down:

Law enforcement agencies can choose to share their information with other agencies.

Both sentences are on the same page. We are not going to tell you which one governs, because only the district can, and it has not. The first is specific and reassuring; the second is generic and describes exactly the capability the first denies is used. A student reading top to bottom is left holding both.

Nothing on the page says how long a plate read is kept.

What is missing

California law requires an agency operating plate readers to publish a usage policy: who may access the system, what training they need, how it is monitored, how long data is held, and with whom it is shared. The district’s page does not link one. What it links instead is a vendor-hosted transparency portal, which is a page of statistics maintained by the company that sells the cameras, and which answers automated requests with a refusal.

We also have no record of the decision. Somewhere there should be a board of trustees agenda item, a staff report and a cost, for twenty cameras across three campuses in two counties. We have not read one, and we are not saying it does not exist. We are saying that the only account of this system we could find is the one the vendor helped write.

If you are a student, an employee or a visitor at any of these three campuses, your plate has been read every time you drove in since April 2023. The district says the data is never shared. The same page says agencies can choose to share. Asking which is true is a reasonable thing to want to do, and the request that would answer it is on this site.