IMPERIAL COUNTY, Calif. - Roughly 180 AI powered automated license plate readers , most of them Flock Safety cameras, are photographing vehicles across Imperial County, reading their plates and logging where and when they traveled. Some of them, the Sheriff's Office acknowledges, may be hidden from public view.
Records obtained by 760 News Media show the cameras are part of a countywide program that has run since 2017 under a committee that includes a representative of the U.S. Border Patrol. The El Centro Police Department is the program's designated host agency, responsible under the agreement for storing and sharing the data. The two member cities that have released their sharing lists each send what their cameras collect to more than 300 law enforcement agencies, all of them in California.
The records also show that in one recent month, officers in one Imperial Valley city searched the system 155 times without recording a single case number, something the county's own regional agreement requires.
Where the cameras are
As of Sept. 24, volunteers tracking the devices through DeFlock,a crowdsourced project built on OpenStreetMap data, had mapped approximately 90 cameras in El Centro, 46 in Brawley (Brawley's own Flock transparency page lists 41), 13 in and around Calexico, 4 in Imperial, 3 in Holtville, 2 each in Heber, Seeley, Salton City and Bombay Beach, and about 18 in unincorporated county areas.
Those numbers are a floor, not a ceiling. The map reflects only cameras someone has found and logged. The El Centro figure is approximate because several mapped points appear to be duplicates.
The public map also does not capture the county's other fleet. A 2017 regional agreement lists 47 vehicle-mounted license plate reader systems distributed among five agencies, plus two radar speed trailers with cameras built in.
What are Flock cameras?
Flock Group Inc. is an Atlanta company that sells AI powered automated license plate readers to police departments. Its cameras are the ones most Imperial Valley drivers pass without noticing: a small black box on a pole beside the road, with a 65-watt solar panel bolted near or above.
A Calexico staff report written when the city bought its cameras describes what they do: "The cameras read license plates and send instant alerts to law enforcement officers when the cameras identify license plates that match those on lists of cars that are stolen or otherwise of interest to the police. Unlike many other Automated License Plate Recognition, Flock cameras allow searches based on the car's color and other visual features."
Cities pay by the camera, by the year. Calexico and Imperial each signed for four cameras in 2023 at $2,500 apiece. By 2025 Imperial was paying $3,000 a camera. The hardware stays Flock's property, and under the agreements these cities signed, what the cameras collect is kept for 30 days.
Flock is not the only vendor in the county, but it is the dominant one. On the volunteer-built DeFlock map, about 9 in 10 of the cameras logged in Imperial County are Flock devices. The rest are made by Motorola Solutions, Genetec and oth
How the system works
The devices work the same way whether they are bolted to a pole or mounted on a patrol car. A camera photographs a passing vehicle, software converts the license plate into text, the plate is checked against lists of stolen and wanted vehicles, and the image is stored along with the time and place it was taken in a database police can search later.
Lt. Joseph Conkey, public information officer for the Imperial County Sheriff's Office, said the cameras do not record video.
"The cameras don't actually record. They just take pictures of license plates," Conkey said. The images capture the rear of a vehicle, and sometimes the front, showing the plate along with the vehicle's make, model and color.
Video recorded by 760 News Media near Bucklin Park in El Centro shows a faint purple pulse each time a vehicle passes. The pulse is the infrared flash of a Flock license plate reader firing to photograph the car. The light is invisible to the human eye but is picked up by specific digital camera sensors.
Deputies can also search without a plate. Conkey said the system can find vehicles by description, giving the example of a 1990s gray Toyota Tacoma, though he said details such as a dent may not appear because the images focus on the bumper.
When a plate matches a hotlist, such as a stolen vehicle or an Amber or Silver alert, the system alerts deputies. Conkey said the Sheriff's Office uses the cameras regularly in investigations ranging from homicides to hit-and-runs and burglaries. He did not have figures on how many cases the system has helped solve.
The program behind the cameras
A Memorandum of Understanding approved by the Imperial County Board of Supervisors on Oct. 10, 2017, established the Imperial County Regional License Plate Recognition Program. Its member agencies are the Brawley, El Centro, Imperial and Westmorland police departments and the Imperial County Sheriff's Office.
The agreement states the program "is managed by a Regional ALPR Committee, comprised of a representative from each of the Member Agencies and a representative from the United States Border Patrol."
The MOU does not state that Border Patrol has access to data collected by the system. It places a federal immigration enforcement agency on the body that governs the program. No local agency has yet answered whether any federal agency can search the data.
We have reached out to the city of El Centro for comment, but I have not yet heard back.
The agreement designates the El Centro Police Department as the Host Agency, responsible for "storage of ALPR Data and sharing of ALPR Data," and the sole point of contact for outside agencies seeking access.
The original equipment was purchased with federal Homeland Security money through Operation Stonegarden, a border security grant program. The agreement says equipment was distributed with consideration given to "the needs of the United States Border Patrol as it relates to furthering the mission of Operation Stonegarden."
The agreement also grants the committee authority to add new agencies or new information sharing systems to the program, and states that "such agreements will not require further review or approval by Member Agencies."
Cameras out of sight
The 2017 agreement explicitly allows cameras to be hidden. It states ALPR devices can be "concealed within stationary objects (i.e. traffic barrels, pole cameras, etc.)" or "concealed within portable traffic warning devices (i.e. sign boards, speed trailers, etc.)."
Asked whether any such cameras operate in Imperial County, Conkey said the majority are in public view, but that "there may be some out there that are hidden from the public."
He did not say how many, where they are or which agency operates them.
In February, the nonprofit newsroom inewsource reported that the Electronic Frontier Foundation had mapped more than 40 hidden license plate readers across southern San Diego and Imperial counties, concealed in orange construction barrels and two-wheeled trailers along highways. EFF said they may belong to Customs and Border Protection or the Drug Enforcement Administration but had not determined ownership.
How the Flock cameras arrived
The fixed cameras now visible on Valley streets came later, through a different funding stream.
A Calexico staff report says members of a body called the Regional License Plate Reader Group met twice, on Oct. 4 and Oct. 13, 2022, to decide how to spend High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area discretionary money on what the report calls the IVDC Regional LPR Program. The report puts the total available at "approximately $444,419.00 from the 2020 and 2021 discretionary grant awards" and says that at both meetings "all members present agreed upon a unanimous vote to fund the project." The city council votes that followed were each city approving its share of a decision already made.
Imperial's council took up an agreement for four cameras in December 2022, on an item submitted by police Capt. Max Sheffield describing them as placed near busy intersections, funded through HIDTA for two years, with "no fiscal impact to the City of Imperial." Calexico's council took up its own agreement on Jan. 18, 2023, for four cameras under a $23,000 contract that HIDTA had already funded, also at no cost to the city.
After the grant period ended, Imperial began paying directly. Records the city released show Flock billed it $23,000 in January 2023 with nothing due, then $12,000 in January 2025 and $12,000 in May 2026. The per-camera price rose over that period from $2,500 a year to $3,000.
Three retention policies, none matching practice
The ALPR policy the Imperial County Sheriff's Office produced to 760 News Media states that license plate data "should be stored for a minimum of two years." That document, numbered Policy 470, carries a revision date of December 2016
The policy manual currently posted on the Sheriff's Office website says something different. Dated December 2020, it contains the same policy renumbered as Policy 468, with the minimum cut in half, to one year.
Assistant County Counsel Mistelle Abdelmagied wrote on Sept. 18 that Sheriff's Office data was "originally set to be stored for one year," but that the office "no longer pays for that storage option so storage is limited to 30 days."
The Imperial and Calexico police policies each say a minimum of one year.
In practice, none of those numbers applies. The Flock agreements these agencies signed set "a thirty (30) day retention policy for all products except Wing Replay." Flock lowered its recommended default again in August 2026, to seven days, though it said existing customers keep the retention they already have.
Security risks
The cameras collecting this data have a documented security record, and the hardware in question is the same model deployed across Imperial County.
In September 2025, an independent security researcher named Jon Gaines published findings on Flock's Falcon and Sparrow license plate readers, the product line named in Calexico's contract with the company. The research led to five formally cataloged vulnerabilities, identified as CVE-2025-59403, CVE-2025-59405, CVE-2025-59406,CVE-2025-59407 and CVE-2025-59409. Among them: administrative controls on the device that could be reached without a password, and login credentials and security keys stored in the camera's software in a form that could be recovered.
Gaines also documented that the Falcon and Sparrow run Android 8.1, a version of the operating system that stopped receiving security updates years ago.
The concern is not limited to the cameras. On Nov. 3, 2025, U.S. Sen. Ron Wyden and U.S. Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi asked the Federal Trade Commission to investigate Flock, writing that the company had "unnecessarily exposed Americans' sensitive personal data to theft by hackers and foreign spies." The letter states that Flock does not require multi-factor authentication, the standard second layer of security most people use to log into email or a bank, on the accounts police use to search license plate data. Congressional staff found that passwords for at least 35 Flock customer accounts had already been stolen. The letter also describes an August 2025 case in which federal drug agents logged into Flock using another officer's credentials, a practice the officer described as common.
The exposure has also reached the open internet. In December 2025, security researchers found at least 60 of Flock's Condor cameras, a different Flock product that streams video, publicly viewable online with no password, allowing anyone to watch live feeds and download stored footage. One reporter drove to Bakersfield and watched himself on an exposed camera in real time.
Flock has said it is addressing security concerns. The company has not published an independent audit of the devices, and none of the vulnerabilities above were discovered by the agencies that bought the cameras.
Who's paying for it
Officials have repeatedly described the cameras as free. Calexico's staff report told the City Council the program would come "at no cost to the city of Calexico," and Police Chief Armando Orozco echoed that, telling Imperial Valley Insight, "Not a dime gets paid by the citizens of Calexico."
That framing is technically accurate but incomplete. The cameras are not paid for out of the city's general fund. They are paid for with federal grant money through HIDTA, the High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area program, which the Calexico staff report names as the funding source. HIDTA allocated $23,000 to Calexico, part of roughly $444,000 in regional grant awards drawn from 2020 and 2021 funding.
But HIDTA is not free money. According to the Congressional Research Service, the program is funded through "a direct appropriation to the HIDTA subaccount under the ONDCP account," meaning it comes from federal tax dollars. So while the cameras cost the city of Calexico nothing, they are still paid for by the public, through a federal program rather than a local one.
Stricter rules for the cameras that record video
Every one of the five Imperial County law enforcement agencies that operates license plate readers holds its other cameras to a standard it does not apply to these.
Policy manuals from all five agencies contain a section governing public safety video surveillance systems. In nearly identical language, all five require that any public area under camera surveillance be marked with conspicuous signs informing the public that the area is under police surveillance. All five require a written log recording who was given access to the footage, which agency they work for, who authorized it and what they viewed. All five bar the use of those cameras to harass, intimidate or discriminate against any individual or group. And all five require the chief or the sheriff to conduct an annual review of the system's cost, benefit and effectiveness.
None of the five imposes any of those requirements on automated license plate readers. There is no signage requirement in any of them. There is no specified access log. Only El Centro's ALPR policy lists prohibited uses. Four of the five say only that ALPR audits "should be conducted on a regular basis," without naming an interval or who conducts them.
All five manuals are produced by Lexipol, a private company that sells template policies to law enforcement agencies nationwide.
What police say
Local law enforcement makes a straightforward case for the cameras: they work. Calexico Police Chief Armando Orozco told Imperial Valley Insight his department operates 17 license plate readers and four live-view cameras, all made by Flock Safety and paid for through grants. "Not a dime gets paid by the citizens of Calexico," he said.
According to Imperial Valley Insight, Orozco estimated that stolen vehicle arrests have risen by roughly 400% since the cameras were installed, crediting the increase largely to camera alerts, and said the technology is especially useful in a border city where stolen cars from across Southern California pass through toward Mexico. He said the readers log the vehicle and plate, not the driver, that the data is erased after one month, and that officers must attach a police report number to every search so supervisors can audit it. "It's a helper," Orozco said. "It's an ability that we do have now."
What the Sheriff's Office says to residents
Conkey said residents should understand that anyone in public can be photographed, whether by traffic cameras, Flock cameras "or somebody standing on the street corner filming you."
He said the cameras are not there to track people's movements but to help solve crimes, and that a resident who becomes a victim could one day benefit from them.
"Just think of the Flock cameras as an eye in the sky to help us help you," he said.
Where the data goes
A document generated Aug. 25 shows the city of Imperial shares its license plate data with 357 organizations. All 357 are in California. They include the Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Jose, Oakland and San Diego police departments, sheriff's offices across Southern California, the California Highway Patrol, the state Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation and the Imperial County District Attorney.
Brawley's sharing list, published on its Flock transparency portal, runs to 320 organizations. All 320 are California agencies.
Imperial shares its data with 357. In both cases, all of them are California agencies. imperial's records also show data moving the other direction. Five agencies share their license plate reads into Imperial's system without Imperial sharing back, including two in Georgia.
Both lists include the Northern California Regional Intelligence Center. Imperial's also includes the Western States Information Network.
Those two organizations were at the center of what happened in San Francisco. On June 18, 2026, San Francisco police told the city's Police Commissionthat an audit had found roughly 300 improper queries of the department's Flock network, and that NCRIC had run searches on behalf of outside agencies and shared information with WSIN. The department disabled both organizations' access. Its chief said the audit found no queries tied to immigration enforcement, and the department did not end its Flock contract.
There is no evidence in the records released that Imperial's or Brawley's data traveled that path. The pathway identified in San Francisco exists in Imperial's sharing list.
No federal immigration agency appears on either list.
Both readers at Calexico's ports of entry are identified in OpenStreetMap data as operated by U.S. Customs and Border Protection, cross-referenced to a dataset maintained by the Electronic Frontier Foundation. California's license plate law reaches only state and local agencies.
What the search logs show
The 2017 regional agreement requires case numbers, but logs from two departments show that standard isn't consistently met.
The agreement sets the same standard. Section 7.6 states that "each transaction in an ALPR repository is to be logged, to include a Case Number, and an audit trail created."
Logs from two Imperial Valley departments show that standard is not consistently met.
Those two departments are the only ones whose search records 760 News Media has been able to obtain. Imperial released its log in response to a public records request. Brawley publishes its own on a public portal.The rest of the agencies have not yet publicly released the audits.
Brawley is the only agency in Imperial County that publishes its license plate searches at all. Its transparency portal posts a rolling record of every query officers run, and it is the reason a second department's logs could be examined for this story without waiting on a records request.
Imperial's log covers every search its officers ran between July 26 and Aug. 24. It records 155 searches by seven officers. Every search lists a reason, most commonly motor vehicle theft. Nine cite traffic infractions, which Flock lists as a prohibited use on its own transparency portals. Not one of the 155 records a case number. The field exists and is empty in every row.
We have reached out to the Imperial Police Department for comment but have not yet heard back.
Brawley's log shows the opposite gap. Of 118 searches between Aug. 24 and Sept. 21, 91 have no reason recorded at all. The field is blank in 77 percent of them. The same portal states that all system access requires a valid reason and again, no case numbers.
A reason is a label. A case number is what ties a search to an actual investigation and allows anyone reviewing the log afterward to confirm it was justified. Neither department's log contains one.
Brawley's log also records how many networks each search reached. Most queried between one and 140. Eight reached more than 500. The department has not explained what the number counts.
Imperial's log shows patterns its stated reasons do not explain. On one evening in August, officers ran 34 searches on a single license plate over roughly eight minutes, recording three different reasons for the same vehicle.
A statewide reckoning
Other California communities are pulling back. Santa Cruz, Mountain View and El Cerrito have ended their Flock contracts this year, and Grass Valley police suspended their license plate readers in August.
In October 2025, Attorney General Rob Bonta sued the city of El Cajon, alleging it shared license plate data with out-of-state and federal agencies in violation of SB 34. In Chico, a ChicoSol investigation found police had given roughly 20 federal agencies and more than 80 out-of-state agencies access to data from the city's Motorola cameras, including ICE.
Flock's public pages say its cameras capture vehicles rather than faces, that agencies own and control their data, and that no secret federal access exists. The Sheriff's Office's own 2022 agreement with Flock statesthat Flock and its licensors "retain all right, title and interest" in the service and "any Recordings or data provided by Flock," and requires the Sheriff's Office to notify Flock of any public records request so the company can oppose disclosure.
A Norfolk, Virginia, trial judge ruled that police need a warrant to search Flock's database, but a Virginia appeals court reversed that decision last October, and in January a federal judge upheld Norfolk's entire camera network, a ruling now on appeal.
What we asked, and what we know
760 News Media filed public records requests with five law enforcement agencies asking each how much they have spent, how many cameras they operate and where, what policy governs their use, and whether the data is shared with any state, federal or out-of-state agency.
City of Imperial: Responded. Produced invoices, its policy, the 2022 council item, a month of search logs and its list of sharing partners. The most complete production of any agency.
Imperial County Sheriff's Office: Responded Sept. 18, on a rolling basis. Produced the 2017 regional MOU, its ALPR policy and its 2022 Flock agreement, and made its public information officer available for an interview.
Calexico: Partially denied and closed. The city produced its contract, council materials and ALPR policy, and reported no correspondence with the state Department of Justice. On Sept. 17 it denied the request for camera numbers and locations, citing an exemption for information security records, and closed the request without addressing its data-sharing records or search logs.
El Centro: No records produced. The city received the request Aug. 12 and has extended its deadline four times, most recently on Sept. 22, the day it had promised production. It now anticipates producing records on or about Oct. 6, 55 days after receipt. The city has not stated whether it possesses responsive records or claimed any exemption. Its ALPR policy, one of the items requested, is published on the city's website, and four of its camera locations were filed with the state in March. El Centro is the designated host agency that stores license plate data for the countywide program and has more mapped cameras than any other city in the county.
Brawley: No records produced. The department received the request Aug. 4. The city attorney said Aug. 13 that records were being gathered and he did not anticipate withholding any, but the city has not provided a production date.
Imperial County: No response to the separate county request submitted Aug. 26.
Coming next
A second report will examine the Regional ALPR Committee, who sits on it, how the program has expanded since 2017, and what the remaining agencies' records show.