Ventura County

In June 2023 the Sheriff’s Office turned off the feature that let police anywhere in the country search its licence plate data. California law requires that. Twenty months later it audited the system to check the switch had held.

It had not. For one month, from 19 February to 19 March 2025, agencies outside California queried this county’s plate data just over 364,000 times, in the Sheriff’s words “without our knowledge or approval”. Two hundred and ninety-nine of those searches carried justifications referencing immigration enforcement, which the Sheriff records as 0.08% of the total. The office found out eleven months after the window closed, after other California agencies discovered the same error.

The vendor could not say what happened. It told the office that logging limitations made the cause impossible to determine, and offered three explanations: an Office administrator, a Flock employee, or a bug. The Office investigated the first and found nobody there had done it. The exposure seems to have ended not because anyone caught it but because the company removed the option for California agencies entirely, for unrelated reasons, on about the last day of the window.

And the question underneath all of it has no answer. The Sheriff put it plainly: the office does not know whether any out-of-state or federal agency actually received images or information from its readers.

Every number here comes from a document this agency wrote and published about itself. It ran the audit, published the findings, and named the two remaining explanations, both of which point at its vendor. It now audits its own settings daily.

What this county cannot show is its own decision. The Board of Supervisors publishes on a platform we have no tooling to read, so we have no record of when the board approved this, what it cost, or whether the public was ever heard. That is a gap in what we can reach, not a finding about the board.