Vallejo advisory board presses police and vendor for stronger ALPR audits, moves to publish Flock logs

The Vallejo Surveillance Advisory Board on Wednesday heard sustained public and member concern about the city’s automated license‑plate reader (ALPR) system operated by Flock Safety and took steps to increase transparency and auditing.

Members of the public told the board the vendor has known security vulnerabilities and that earlier audits in other jurisdictions prompted removals of Flock deployments. Eric McGarren told the board he watched a video showing open camera streams and urged Vallejo officials to obtain vendor security audits and share them with the board and city council. Shay Grove and Jose Carrizales called for pausing the system until Flock’s internal audit module is active and independently verified. George Aguilar urged the board to deny continued Measure P funding for surveillance until the city produces local metrics showing public‑safety benefits.

Captain Bautista of the Vallejo Police Department said the department provides the board with regular technology usage reports (drone logs, Raven system alerts, ALPR logs) and that a recent network error on Flock’s side produced an incorrect ALPR hot‑list number in published reports; he said operational use was not affected and that an updated report would be distributed once the vendor resolves the error. Bautista described vendor and configuration safeguards he said had been implemented, saying Flock disabled a national lookup feature for California agencies in March 2025, blocked out‑of‑state agencies from creating sharing relationships in June 2025, and revoked certain one‑to‑one out‑of‑state sharing by customer consent in June 2025.

Board members repeatedly pressed for more detail about auditing. Members said the department’s existing LPR audit process—a once‑a‑year review of a random 10‑event sample—was too small, and they asked whether audit settings produce logs that reveal who accessed the city’s data, including vendor employees or out‑of‑state agencies. Bautista said a prior audit identified a misuse tied to a broadly entered reason rather than a specific case number; he described that as a personnel matter and said details are handled internally under department policy and are not currently public.

To increase transparency, the board voted to agendize creating a public‑facing web page to present Flock audit information or extracts (for example: date, time and audit metrics) and asked police to provide a sample of the Flock audit log for the next meeting. Members also asked the city attorney and police for the most recent, redlined contract and for clarifications about where data are hosted and how Measure P and grant funds are being applied.

The board directed staff to compile written technical questions from members and to invite a Flock representative to a future meeting to answer detailed technical questions about audit capability, data access logs and vendor controls. The board’s audit subcommittee also scheduled a meeting with VPD in early June to review auditing practices more deeply.

What happens next: the city attorney will confirm whether the requested materials and any personnel‑reporting details can be shared publicly; police will provide a sample audit log and follow up with answers about vendor/network errors and data hosting; the board’s web‑page proposal will return to a future meeting for further direction.