Oakland Police Department ALPR usage

October 13, 2025

Table of contents

This report is based on data obtained via California Public Record Act request 25-6339 for data related to the ALPR system operated by the Oakland Police Department (hereafter OPD). It covers the period August 12, 2024 through June 18, 2025.

The Transparency portal.

1:1 Sharing audit

Under 1:1 Sharing, each agency decides which other agencies can access its data. Agency A can share with agency B without B sharing with A.

OPD and X allow reciprocal searches: 251 agencies.

OPD allows searches, but X does not: 18 agencies.

OPD does not allow searches but X does: 0 agencies.

Sharing via Statewide lookup

OPD participates in Statewide lookup. This allows California agencies to search the OPD data without any prior agreement on sharing, but limits the searches to full license plates.

69 agencies without 1:1 Sharing have accessed the OPD data since August 12, 2024.

Organization audit: number of queries

Most of the 72,878 queries made by OPD involve, among others, cameras controlled by the OPD. 2,798 queries involve only non-OPD cameras.

Organization audit: number of agencies and cameras

The first column is the number of agencies that queried the data, which by construction must be 1 in an organization audit.

The second column is the maximum number of cameras involved in a query. While most agencies operate a relatively small number of cameras, they can search data captured by other agencies.

The next column, “% 0-100” is the percentage of queries that involved less than 100 cameras. Similarly, the following columns are the percentages for 100 to 1k cameras, 1k to 10k cameras and more than 10k cameras respectively.

Organization audit: personnel

There are 222 distinct user names in the Organization queries.

Network audit: number of queries

That amounts to one query every 20 seconds, and one case every 200 seconds.

For 20 queries made on OPD data, there is only 1 made by OPD (roughly).

Network audit: number of agencies and cameras

See this previous section for the meaning of the columns.

The low number of cameras in January 2025 was caused by a systemic problem with the Flock system.

As we have seen in the previous section, the queries by other agencies vastly dominate. From the point of view of those agencies, OPD is just one of many agencies, more or less geographically distant. When OPD’s data is searched, there are probably many other agencies searched as well, and therefore many cameras involved.

Top agencies accessing OPD data

The 25 agencies with the largest number of cases involving OPD data since August 12, 2024:

Potentially problematic queries

The Flock system filters queries by keywords, in an attempt to avoid uses prohibited by SB 40, but we do not know what those keywords are.

Here are cases/queries with “ICE”, “DHS”, “HSI” (which can stand for Homeland Security Investigation), “CBP”, “FBI”, “ATF”, “AFT” (typo for “ATF”), “Marshal”, “Marshals”, “Marshall”, “Marshalls”, “border”, or “immigration” as a word in the case number or reason.

The cases: