Visalia Police | License plate readers

Four decisions, four consent calendars

Visalia’s council has taken four decisions about licence plate readers since 2023. Every one was a sole source award. Every one was on a consent calendar, the part of a meeting where items are “considered routine and will be enacted in one motion”. None was pulled out for discussion.

That is the whole record, from a sweep of the council’s agendas and minutes back to 2021.

What a consent calendar is for

The October 2024 item, in full:

Authorization to Award Contracts for License Plate Readers - Authorize the City Manager to award a four (4) year sole source contract to Flock Group, Inc. in the amount of $300,000 for Flock Fixed Automatic License Plate Readers (ALPR).

It was number 6 of eleven, approved in a single motion alongside a traffic signal contract, a grant acceptance, a committee appointment and an agreement with a dairy. Directly above the list, the agenda explains the rule it was passing under:

Consent Calendar items are considered routine and will be enacted in one motion. There will be no separate discussion of these matters unless a request is made by a City Council Member and then the item will be removed from the Consent Calendar to be discussed and voted upon by a separate motion

Five ayes. No discussion of the cameras, because the mechanism is built so that there is none.

Nothing here was hidden, and that is worth saying plainly before anything else. The vendor, the four-year term, the price and the words “License Plate Readers” are in the item’s own title, on a public agenda posted in advance. Anyone could have read it.

The escape hatch works, too. At the March 2023 meeting, a member of the public asked for item 7 to be pulled for separate discussion, and it was: the council voted “to Approve the Consent Calendar except item 7”. So on the night Visalia bought 134 plate reader licences, someone in that room successfully pulled a different item off the routine list. The plate readers were item 2.

The finding is not that anyone concealed anything. It is that four sole-source surveillance contracts in a row were classified as routine, correctly, under the council’s own rules.

A licence is not a camera

The Flock half of this is the part the department talks about publicly: fixed cameras on poles, a transparency portal, a training bulletin. The Axon half is larger and almost invisible.

In March 2023 the council bought “134 software licenses for Automatic License Plate Readers (ALPR)”. In December 2024 it added 23 more. In between it licensed four to the Tulare Regional Auto Theft Task Force, paid for out of the Tulare County AB286 Auto Theft Fund, which is a county fund being spent through a city council’s consent calendar on a regional body.

We are quoting “software licenses” rather than translating it, because we do not know what these licences run on. Nothing in the council record says whether they sit in patrol cars, on poles, or somewhere else, how many physical devices exist, or where any of them are. A licence count is a procurement fact, not a deployment map, and this page is not going to turn one into the other.

What can be said is the ratio. The department’s own January 2025 bulletin describes eleven fixed Flock cameras installed and eleven scheduled. The council has separately licensed 157 Axon plate readers. The publicly discussed system is the smaller one.

More cameras than it owns

More cameras than it owns

On 16 January 2025, three months after the Flock vote, the Visalia Police Department issued a training bulletin to its own officers explaining the fixed camera system they were now using. Three sentences in, it says this:

The Visalia Police Department has partnered with Flock Safety and installed 11 Flock ALPR cameras throughout the City of Visalia, with another 11 scheduled for installation. Additionally, the Department has been granted access to 24 Flock ALPRs owned by various organizations within the City of Visalia.

Eleven cameras the city bought. Twenty-four it did not.

That second number is the one worth sitting with, because it is the part no public body sized. A council can vote on eleven cameras. Nobody votes on the twenty-four, because each of them belongs to a business, a school, a homeowners’ association or a private owner who bought it for their own reasons and let the department in. The same arrangement is documented in San Benito County, where Hollister’s police chief explained to his council in writing that private individuals, schools and homeowners’ associations can buy their own Flock systems, and that the company folds those privately bought devices into what the department can search. That page on this site carries the document.

This is how a plate reader network in a mid-sized American city actually reaches its size. The public decision sets a floor and the private market sets the number.

What it looks for

The bulletin describes two functions: real-time alerts on wanted vehicles, and a search tool for investigations. The alerts run against hotlist and stolen-vehicle entries and sound when the Flock website is open.

The search side is broader than a plate number:

Flock ALPRs also include patented Vehicle Fingerprint technology, which leverages machine learning and computer vision to break down the captured evidence into searchable queries. This will allow members of the Visalia Police Department to conduct searches of offenders by license plate or vehicle description.

Searching by description rather than plate is a different capability from reading plates, and it is worth naming plainly: it means the system can be asked about a vehicle whose plate nobody has.

The bulletin is careful in one respect that deserves credit. It tells officers that the verification of every Flock alert before enforcement action “is of the utmost importance”, and that they “must ensure the accuracy of the alert by verifying the license plate through Dispatch”. Plate readers misread plates, and departments that skip that step are how people end up face-down on a roadway over a clerical error. Visalia wrote the step down.

Two cameras at a time

The installations reach the state’s record in an unusual unit. A Notice of Exemption filed on 28 February 2025, with the police department as lead agency, describes the project in full as:

The project consists of the installation of two Flock Safety automated license plate reading (ALPR) cameras to be installed on behalf of the City of Visalia Police Department. The installation consists of the attachment of a camera and solar panel (to power the camera) to an existing light/traffic pole with no proposed ground disturbance.

Two cameras. There is at least one more notice like it. The environmental exemption is a routine and appropriate filing for bolting a camera to a pole, and it is not a surveillance review of any kind. It is worth mentioning only because it is the one place the state’s records touch this network at all, and it touches it two poles at a time.

The policy we could not find

The last instruction in the bulletin is this:

Department members are reminded to adhere to Policy 428 Automated License Plate Readers (ALPRs) when using the Flock Safety system.

So there is a Policy 428. It is the document that would say how long the reads are kept, who may search them, what an audit looks like, and whether anything is shared with other agencies. Every question this page cannot answer is a question Policy 428 exists to answer.

California law requires an agency operating plate readers to publish a usage policy. In August 2026 we looked at the city’s police policy manual page and found three documents on it: a preface from the chief, a law enforcement code of ethics, and a mission statement. Policy 428 was not among them, and we did not find it elsewhere on the city’s site.

We are describing our search, not the department’s filing cabinet. The policy may well be published somewhere we did not look, and the city runs two different hostnames for this department, which is the kind of thing that hides a document. But a reader who wants to know how long Visalia keeps a record of where their car was is in the same position we are.

The department publishes a great deal else, and so does its council: all four awards were on public agendas with their vendors, terms and prices on the face of them. Its transparency page carries AB 481 military equipment reports for four separate years, which is more than many California cities manage. That statute covers drones, armoured vehicles and less-lethal munitions, and Visalia reports on all of them in detail. It does not cover plate readers, so none of that disclosure reaches this system. The 2026 report mentions licence plates exactly zero times.

Two technologies, two statutes, two different amounts of daylight.