San Francisco Tightens Its License Plate Camera Rules, but a Privacy Advocate Says Much of It Was Already the Law

San Francisco is keeping its network of license plate cameras, but with new limits on how police can use the data. Critics say the changes sound bigger than they are.

Mayor Daniel Lurie announced the rules on Sept. 29 alongside District Attorney Brooke Jenkins, Police Chief Derrick Lew and Assemblymember Matt Haney. They cover the city's more than 400 automated license plate readers, all run by the Atlanta-based company Flock Safety, which photograph passing cars so police can search for vehicles tied to crimes.

What changes

• A 30-day window. Officers lose routine access to plate data after 30 days. According to Mission Local, looking at older data requires sign-off from police leadership and an active investigation. Flock must remove San Francisco's data from its platform after 30 days and hand it to the department, which can keep it for up to a year.
• A reason for every search. Each search must be tied to a specific incident number, the officer must state why, and the system records who ran it.
• More review. The police department will check its logs monthly, and the Department of Police Accountability is being asked to audit use of the system. Officers who break the policy face discipline or firing, the mayor's office said.

"This technology keeps San Franciscans safe," Lurie said, according to KQED, adding that the city won't return to a time when people could commit serious crimes "and expect to get away with it."

The pushback

A San Francisco Public Press report published Monday found that several of those safeguards have been required since 2016 under California's license plate reader law, SB 34, which already obliges agencies to log the date, time, plate searched, person searching and purpose of each lookup.

Brian Hofer of the Oakland privacy group Secure Justice called the package "performative art," telling the outlet that audits only catch misuse after the data has already been seen.

The Public Press also noted that the policy doesn't adopt a key recommendation from the city's Human Rights Commission: putting police in direct control of Flock's Nationwide Lookup feature, which city officials said Flock had turned on without the department's knowledge. For now that feature is simply disabled. A police audit disclosed in June found 299 searches of San Francisco's Flock data made on behalf of federal or out-of-state agencies between May 2025 and May 2026, the outlet reported. Chief Lew said the department found that problem itself and cut off access.

What's next

Jenkins and Haney are drafting a state bill to make misuse or unauthorized sharing of plate reader data a crime. It follows a case in which a San Jose officer was fired, but not charged, for using the system to track a woman who had accused his relative of domestic violence. The bill could be introduced in December at the earliest. Separately, the Board of Supervisors is set to vote in February 2027 on whether to extend the city's Flock contract, Mission Local reported.