San Francisco Police Department ALPR usage

October 13, 2025

Table of contents

This report is based on data obtained via California Public Record Act request P222366-090425, for data related to the ALPR system operated by the San Francisco Police Department (hereafter SFPD). It covers the period August 16, 2024 through June 2, 2025.

The SFPD decided to redact the case number and reason from the Organization and Network audits. Consequently, there is not enough data to reconstruct cases (even approximately), and each query is treated as a separate case.

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.

SFPD and X allow reciprocal searches: 222 agencies.

SFPD allows searches, but X does not: 57 agencies.

SFPD does not allow searches but X does: 37 agencies.

Sharing outside California

Prior to February 12, 2025, there are numerous queries from agencies outside California.

3,835 agencies outside California accessed the SFPD data, with 1,604,744 cases / 1,604,744 queries. The 25 most active agencies:

Some are federal agencies, but with few queries:

Given the number of non CA agencies, it seems likely that their queries were enabled by National Lookup, rather than by 1:1 Sharing (which would have required to select all those agencies one by one, or selecting agencies by a very large radius).

These queries are clear violations of California SB 40, as California state and local law enforcement agencies have been reminded by the California Attorney General in 2023.

Sharing via Statewide lookup

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

55 agencies without 1:1 Sharing have accessed the SFPD data since February 12, 2025.

Organization audit: number of queries

Most of the 392,040 queries made by SFPD involve, among others, cameras controlled by the SFPD. 5,738 queries involve only non-SFPD cameras.

That amounts to one query every minute.

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

The Organization audit list 730 distinct user names.

Network audit: number of queries

In addition to the situation over the whole audited period, we also look at the period since February 12, 2025, when sharing outside California stopped:

Over the recent period, that amounts to one query every 6 seconds.

The number of cases has been steadily increasing each month, with a reset when sharing outside of California was stopped:

Network audit: number of agencies and cameras

See this previous section for the meaning of the columns.

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

Top agencies accessing SFPD data

The 25 agencies with the largest number of cases involving SFPD data since February 12, 2025: