Fresno will not renew its contract with Flock Safety, the automated license plate reader company whose cameras watch traffic across the city, Mayor Jerry Dyer and Police Chief Mindy Casto announced at a joint news conference on Friday, November 6. The contract expires in February 2027, and the city says it will look for a different company to run its plate-reader programme instead.
The reason, officials said, is data sharing. A recent investigation found that agencies outside Fresno's jurisdiction had been accessing the city's Flock data — plate scans collected from Fresno streets were being reached by organisations the city had not intended to give that access. Dyer said Fresno has used license plate reader technology for more than 15 years, and that this is the first time the city has had data-sharing concerns of this kind.
The Fresno Chamber of Commerce's summary of the announcement likewise reports that the city is seeking another company to provide license plate reader services, and a local account of the news conference noted that the Fresno Police Department's own Flock transparency page lists 268 agencies in California as authorised to access the data collected in the city — a figure that shows how widely plate scans from one city can travel once they enter a shared network.
What Fresno has been paying — and who has been watching the cameras
The scale of the programme has been public for months. Reporting by The Collegian, the Fresno State student newspaper, in September put the Fresno Police Department in a roughly $1.5 million, three-year contract with Flock Safety for license plate readers and drones, paid through a $23.66 million state grant Fresno received from California — the largest such award to any police department in the state, and one that itself expires on June 1, 2027. The city's own contract document records a Master Service Agreement dated February 22, 2024, originally not to exceed $1,498,690.41, and three amendments that lifted the total ceiling to $1,668,440.41 and added the Department of Public Utilities to the agreement.
Source: The Collegian, Fresno State — 'Flock raises concerns in Fresno,' Sep. 1, 2026
How many cameras that money buys depends on who is counting. Chief Casto put the city's fixed readers at 70. The Collegian reported the same police figure of approximately 70 Flock cameras, while a local activist group, Fresno Resistance, has claimed there are about 205 Flock cameras within Fresno. The gap between the official count and the activist count has never been publicly reconciled, and it is one reason the programme has drawn sustained local argument.
A community campaign that arrived before the announcement
Opposition in Fresno did not begin this week. The Deflock Fresno movement collected more than 2,300 signatures on a petition asking the city council to reject a contract renewal, and community members spent the autumn raising privacy questions about who could see the data, how long it is kept, and where it can go. Flock Safety's chief executive, Garrett Langley, said earlier this year that the company's data storage time will be shortened to seven days starting January 1, 2027 — a change campaigners noted still left the question of outside access untouched.
Source: The Collegian, Fresno State — 'Flock raises concerns in Fresno,' Sep. 1, 2026
Fresno's history with plate readers also predates Flock. The city has used automated license plate reader systems since at least 2016, previously contracting with Vigilant Solutions, and a state audit in 2020 found fault with the city's handling of the technology; the police department answered with its Policy 453 for automated license plate readers in May 2021. Friday's decision is therefore not a decision to stop reading plates — it is a decision that this vendor, on these data-sharing terms, will not be the one doing it after February.
Fresno sits on State Route 99 in the heart of the Central Valley, and its streets are driven daily by one of the largest Punjabi communities in the United States — including thousands of truck drivers whose rigs pass plate readers on the 99 corridor and across the city every day. A plate scan is a record of where a vehicle was and when. Friday's announcement is an admission, by the city's own mayor and police chief, that records collected in Fresno were being accessed beyond the city's jurisdiction — and a promise that the next contract will be written differently.
What happens next
The Flock contract runs until February 2027, so the cameras do not go dark this week. In the months ahead the city must run a procurement for a replacement vendor, write the privacy and data-sharing terms that officials say the current arrangement lacked, and settle how the programme is paid for once the state grant expires on June 1, 2027 — renewal funding would otherwise have had to come from the city's general fund. What has not been announced is whether any outside agency's access has already been cut off, or what happens to the plate data Fresno has already collected. Those are the questions Fresno drivers — and the city council — will be asking between now and February.