Automated license plate reader records obtained by the Los Gatan confirm the Santa Clara County Sheriff’s Office did not share data with Texas authorities searching in May for a woman who had an abortion.
However, the Los Gatos-Monte Sereno Police Department has now missed a statutory transparency deadline after being asked for records that would prove it didn’t leak information to the man hunting the individual.
The Los Gatan analyzed more than 2,400 searches of license plate cameras the Sheriff’s Office has access to, from Georgia-based Flock Safety, covering the period of January to June this year. According to the data, only County personnel conducted searches across their 52 networks and more than 1,800 cameras.
Some information, including the reasons for each search and around one tenth of the names of officers conducting searches, were redacted by the Sheriff’s Office, which stated, “the public interest served by not disclosing these portions of the record clearly outweighs the public interest served by disclosure so as to protect privacy interests of individuals and criminal information.”
The agency’s Flock Safety transparency portal specifies that “all system access requires a valid reason,” and that data can’t be used for immigration enforcement or to target people based only on their gender.
While the Los Gatan asked for the same records from the Los Gatos-Monte Sereno Police Department on June 13, the department has yet to officially reply to the request.
Under the California Public Records Act, agencies have 10 calendar days to respond to requests for public records. This deadline can be extended by up to 14 days, but only in unusual circumstances and with written notice.
The Santa CLara County SHeriff’s Office was quick to send the REQUESTED records over
When asked about the delay, a LGMSPD official told the Los Gatan over the phone it had lost track of the request. And an official at Town Hall said Los Gatos just overhauled its public records request system on July 1, switching from JustFOIA, a Florida-based company, to NextRequest, based in San Francisco.
On its Transparency and Data page, the Town says it’s “cognizant of its responsibilities under the Public Records Act” and that “it recognizes the statutory scheme was enacted to maximize citizen access to the workings of government.”
After the Los Gatan received an initial batch of records from the Sheriff’s Office on June 24, 10 days after its initial request, the Sheriff’s Office provided an additional six months worth of data, covering the period of June to December of last year. These include “network audits,” which track searches of cameras from agencies in the area, and “organization audits,” which only include searches by personnel within the Sheriff’s Office.
Network audits from June to October of last year reveal more than 800,000 searches were conducted by personnel, whose names were redacted, from at least 150 different jurisdictions across the state.
Some organizations, including the San Francisco Police Department and Los Angeles Police Department, conducted more than 10,000 searches monthly which included Santa Clara County’s cameras. These searches were far-reaching, with some spanning across more than 23,000 individual cameras in the Flock network.
But starting in November 2024, network audits show that only personnel from within the Sheriff’s Office were conducting searches, and at a much lower rate.
Last month, both the Santa Clara County Sheriff’s Office and Los Gatos-Monte Sereno Police Department told the Los Gatan they hadn’t shared their license plate data with anyone out-of-state. Activist groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation say workarounds make Flock Safety’s networks too easy to penetrate.
After 404 Media broke the story of a Texas law enforcer searching Flock Safety cameras nationwide to track down a woman who allegedly performed an abortion on herself, Garrett Langley, founder and CEO of Flock Safety, released a blog post addressing the situation.
He called reporting on the story by the EFF “purposefully misleading,” clarifying the woman was the subject of a missing persons investigation rather than the suspect in a criminal case.
Langley also added that an internal audit over all of Flock’s systems revealed no instance where law enforcement targeted women seeking healthcare.
“As a private technology company of around 1500 people, Flock cannot determine the criminal codes or what is enforced,” Langley said in the post. “We rely on the democratic process, on the individuals that the majority vote for to represent us, to determine what is and is not acceptable in cities and states.”
