San Jose police rein in license-plate reader policies as surveillance-tech debate rages

SAN JOSE — Amid blowback to the spread of automated license-plate readers surveilling Bay Area cities and fears about such technology enabling more immigration enforcement, the San Jose Police Department is reining in its data retention and access for outside agencies, according to the police chief and policy documents.

In a policy memo released Thursday, SJPD Chief Paul Joseph asks the City Council to approve key changes, namely shrinking the retention period for plate data from one year to 30 days, and banning cameras from recording vehicles entering and leaving houses of worship and reproductive health clinics.

Joseph also wrote that his department has revised its policies for authorizing and logging plate data requests to require more information from outside agencies. The changes aim particularly to ensure that the department is not inadvertently cooperating with agencies from out of state who are thus not subject to California law prohibiting local police from participating in immigration-related actions.

In an interview Thursday, Joseph said the revisions are aimed at touting the value of the city’s 474 automatic license-plate reader (ALPR) cameras as a force multiplier for a thinly staffed police department. He added that the changes sought to answer the corresponding privacy concerns that have prompted other municipalities to ditch them.

“We have to have the tools that are available to law enforcement these days to make us as effective and efficient as we could possibly be,” he said, “while at the same time acknowledging that there are legitimate concerns about privacy, and legitimate concerns about misuse of the data.”

The administrative changes outlined in the memo — set to be heard by the council March 10 — ramp up requirements for California police agencies, including documenting detailed reasoning for a data request. Requests from agencies that don’t already have sharing agreements with the department will now be vetted by a commander under the new directives.

The police software portal for the plate data also has new prompts reminding users that the data cannot be shared with federal immigration authorities. Joseph also writes in the memo that SJPD has disabled a “Federal Sharing” setting in the portal to block requests from agencies that identify as or are coded as federal agencies.

Some of the changes appear aimed at publicly voiced concerns about how the data is being shared and accessed. In November, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and ACLU of Northern California, representing the immigrant-rights organization SIREN and the Bay Area chapter of the Council on American–Islamic Relations, sued the City of San Jose, Joseph and Mayor Matt Mahan arguing that continuous searches through the data without judicial warrants were unreasonable searches that violate the California Constitution.

Upon hearing about the SJPD policy revisions, EFF Surveillance Litigation Director Andrew Crocker called them “extremely limited reforms that fall far short of what is necessary.”

“By holding on to ALPR data for a full month, San Jose still possesses detailed files about anyone who drives in the city, revealing their patterns of travel, who they associate with, and much more,” Crocker told this news organization. “San Jose Police and (their) sharing partners can still search this data indiscriminately without any proof that the results are connected to an actual crime.”

The ideological clash endures as an array of cities in the greater Bay Area have similarly grappled with reconciling the touted public safety benefits of the readers and the surveillance state threat that critics and watchdogs assert that they pose.

On Tuesday, the Mountain View City Council voted to end its contract with Flock Systems, a major vendor of the plate readers. That followed the disclosure by its police chief that an audit found unauthorized access to one city camera by federal agencies between August and November 2024, owing to a “nationwide” search setting enabled by Flock.

Also this week, Santa Clara County supervisors voted to prohibit the sheriff’s office — which carries out policing contracts in Cupertino, Los Altos Hills and Saratoga — from pulling data from the Flock cameras installed in those cities, largely diminishing their utility to local law enforcement; though for now, the cameras will remain.

Santa Cruz leaders voted last month to stop using the cameras under similar circumstances: a police acknowledgment in November that the department had allowed camera data to be accessed by out-of-state agencies.

The pendulum didn’t swing quite as hard in other Bay Area cities, including Oakland, which last December approved a two-year, $2.25 million Flock contract. In what is perhaps an embodiment of the unsettled public policy debate, the Oakland chapter of the NAACP supported the cameras as a useful crime-fighting tool, provided they are “deployed strategically, with transparency and community oversight,” pitting them against privacy advocates who initially convinced city leaders to reject the contract.

In San Jose, the cameras are frequently lauded by Joseph and Mayor Matt Mahan for their roles in solving crimes, particularly homicides, and there is no indication that they’re coming down. Joseph listed off recent high-profile arrests in which he said ALPR cameras led to relatively swift arrests, including a teen charged with shooting three people at Westfield Valley Fair mall on Black Friday, the January arrest of a registered sex offender in the abduction of a teen girl downtown, and the arrest of two men in the fatal shooting of a 17-year-old boy earlier this month outside a Winchester Boulevard pizzeria.

“I think these cameras are always going to be useful. The ALPR cameras are the linchpin of everything we’re trying to do with technology here at San Jose PD,” Joseph said. “To lose these cameras would just be so devastating to our public safety.”

On top of the civil-rights litigation, a security analyst has claimed SJPD allowed other California police agencies as recently as June 2025 to search data from its vast network of automatic license plate reading cameras apparently on behalf of federal authorities.

Crocker seized on that finding to argue that the revisions Joseph outlines are insufficient to prevent reoccurrences.

“The limitations on searching for purposes related to immigration enforcement would do little to prevent side door access by California law enforcement on behalf of federal authorities, something that has been documented repeatedly around the state,” he said. “Any improvements in the proposal are fleeting and could be reversed in subsequent policy changes … A better solution is to simply turn these cameras off.”

The police department and city maintain that despite the appearance of terms like “DEA,” “ICE,” and “HSI” — the abbreviations for the federal Drug Enforcement Agency, Immigrations and Customs Enforcement and Homeland Security Investigations — in searches by external agencies, they found no evidence that data was shared with immigration officials.

“I think when when you take a a sober look at what’s going on, you’re going to see that our data has not ever fallen into the hands of anyone that’s used it for immigration purposes,” Joseph said.

The chief said he acknowledges that his department’s policies, revised and proposed, will still incur opposition and criticism. That’s one reason, he says, that he has requested that the council review and codify his proposals, both to ensure their longevity and to allow for public discussion of the merits.

“We want to assure you that there are we’re putting even greater safeguards in place so that you, the community, and you, the elected officials, can feel confident in this program.”

This is a developing story. Check back for updates.