San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie announced last month what he called “tighter limits” on the nearly 500 Flock surveillance cameras that capture license plate data in the city, pitting public safety against privacy concerns.
But the policies he unveiled still give the San Francisco Police Department access to license-plate photos and data for far longer than some other cities in the Bay Area, and more than 50 times longer than what Flock recommends.
Flock cameras, which are located across the city, photograph and archive the license plates and physical details of every passing car. Law enforcement officials statewide can then search this database, allowing them to track vehicles in real-time and see where those vehicles have been.
Several Bay Area police departments — including those of San Jose, Oakland and South San Francisco — are required to “purge” or delete all license plate photos after 30 days, unless that data is marked beforehand as necessary for evidence.
Flock itself recommends police departments delete data after a week, following a recent review of when searches occur.
San Francisco’s new rules, which went into effect Oct. 5, require police to remove photos from Flock’s database after 30 days, instead of one year, which was the old policy.
But the Flock photos, instead of being erased, will be moved to an internal SFPD platform for an additional 11 months, which officers can access so long as they have approval from a supervising officer and the information is needed for an active investigation.
“It’s not a terrible first step, but it does not go far enough,” said Brian Cox, a San Francisco deputy public defender. Deleting data after 30 days only to transfer the information, he said, “absolutely misses the forest for the trees.”
Removing the data from Flock’s database system makes it harder for outside law enforcement agencies to access SFPD data after 30 days. Law enforcement agencies will now have to query San Francisco’s police department directly; previously they only had to search for data through Flock’s network.
The mayor’s new policies come on the heels of massive controversy surrounding Flock’s cameras, nationwide as well as in the city. Lurie described the updated policies as a compromise between safety and privacy.
This summer, San Francisco police announced that their Flock data had been illegally searched 299 times by out-of-state agencies. In 2025, the San Francisco Standard reported that the city’s Flock data had been illegally accessed 1.6 million times, including searches related to immigration enforcement.
In the past year, some municipalities in the Bay Area, including Mountain View and Santa Clara County, have cancelled their Flock contracts entirely. San Francisco’s Flock contract is up for renewal in February.
Asked about SFPD’s yearlong retention policy, department spokesperson Evan Sernoffsky pointed to a 2023 ordinance passed by the Board of Supervisors, which defined the department’s surveillance technology policy on automatic license plate readers, known as ALPRs.
That ordinance “requires us to retain ALPR data for one year,” Sernoffsky wrote.
The policy was modeled off of the Northern California Regional Intelligence Center, a multi-jurisdictional intelligence “fusion” center that, at the time, had a 12-month retention policy for license plate data. But that center now allows for shorter, 30-day retention, while the city’s 2023 ordinance remains unchanged.
Lee Hepner, a former aide to former city Supervisor Aaron Peskin and a key architect of the city’s surveillance technology legislation, said SFPD should adopt a new retention period if the original justification no longer makes sense.
“The city bears the burden of explaining why they are retaining records for a 12 month period,” he said.
A city supervisor or the mayor would have to introduce a legislative change, and the Board of Supervisors would have to vote it through.
Critics of a longer retention period say, generally, that keeping license plate data for so long doesn’t help solve most crimes — but makes it easier for the technology to be abused by bad actors, or overly relied on.
The police department “could work with the Board of Supervisors to get those ordinances changed,” said police commissioner Kevin Benedicto, who has requested that license plate reader policies be heard before the commission, for more public input.
Abigail Hall, a surveillance technology researcher, described Lurie’s changes as part of a “broad policy trend” in which cities are responding to public pressure over how Flock is being used.
“The features that make technologies like Flock so helpful to police are also what make people uncomfortable,” Hall said, and that “inherent tension” is what city governments now seem to be trying to address.
Overall, Lurie’s changes bring San Francisco’s license-plate policies closer to what neighboring cities are practicing. The changes formalize a regular audit schedule for Flock, require police to investigate their own license plate search logs for misconduct, and limit the reasons allowing police to search Flock’s system.
The new policies call for San Francisco police to conduct monthly internal audits with an annual outside audit by the city’s Department of Police Accountability. San Jose conducts weekly internal audits with a monthly external one. Oakland requires only an annual review of police Flock logs.
SFPD officers will also be required to cite an incident report number for every search of license plate data, bringing the city in line with Oakland and San Jose.
Crypto billionaire Chris Larsen, who funded much of San Francisco’s surveillance network and who called on the police to delete its Flock data sooner, said Lurie’s policies were an important advancement.
“The Mayor’s announcement is the right step,” Larsen wrote to Mission Local, “in recalibrating the ever changing trade-off between public safety and privacy.”
Since the mayor’s new Flock policies were announced, the San Francisco police department has also advanced updated regulations around drone surveillance.
