SAN JOSE — After a San Jose police officer was fired earlier this year for abusing his access to the city’s Flock automated license-plate reader camera database, city leaders are pushing for tighter controls to curb unauthorized use.
San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan and Vice Mayor Pam Foley are seeking City Council approval for the controls on the data, including creating city-wide policies prohibiting employees from using personal devices to access ALPR and other law-enforcement databases, echoing a directive that Police Chief Paul Joseph implemented at the San Jose Police Department earlier this month after revealing the ex-officer’s breach.
They are also calling for City Manager Jennifer Maguire to work with police to increase the frequency of audits of individual database access to more readily flag suspicious searches that lack a legitimate law-enforcement purpose or potentially violate city policy, or come from non-department devices.
“What we had here was a disgusting abuse of power and really a perversion of technology that has been deployed to protect people,” Mahan said in an interview Tuesday. “That’s why I want to strengthen these elements.”
Additionally, the initiative also advocates for the state Legislature to close a loophole in a law that makes it illegal for officers to access legacy law enforcement databases without a legitimate law-enforcement reason, but currently does not cover newer databases like the ones maintained for camera systems like Flock, the country’s preeminent ALPR vendor.
That dovetails with previous statements from Joseph, who voiced disappointment earlier this month that the statutory gap prevented the offending officer from facing criminal charges for his breach.
According to SJPD, the terminated officer’s actions surfaced in February 2025 when a woman reported to police that a man she was accusing of domestic violence implied to her that he was tracking her.
Knowing that the man’s cousin was a police officer, she reported the interaction to police, who ran her license plate through their Flock database and discovered improper access by the officer. The actions were logged in an audit trail. The cousin was later arrested but not criminally charged.
“I was appalled that a member of our police force would use the information in such a horrible way,” Foley said. “That situation could have ended tragically.”
Joseph said previously that the officer was fired this past April following an internal investigation, and that the department has referred the officer to the Commission on Peace Officer Standards and Training for potential decertification to bar him from getting another law enforcement job in the state.
Mahan said that still falls short of what state law should allow.
“I think there should be criminal charges when you misuse sensitive data like this,” Mahan said. “He should face more than job loss for abusing his power to protect people, to instead put someone in harm’s way.”
Foley said of their advocacy of clear criminal penalties for this kind of data misuse, “of all of these pieces, (this) may be the most important one.”
Critics have pointed to the access abuse as grounds to severely curtail the investigative reach of ALPR cameras.
The Bay Area chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union and San Francisco-based Electronic Frontier Foundation, on behalf of immigrant-rights organization SIREN and the local branch of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, are suing San Jose in Santa Clara County Superior Court, arguing that the current state of unfettered searches through the database constitute unconstitutional tracking of law-abiding citizens. They are demanding that police agencies obtain warrants before combing through data.
The Institute for Justice, based in Virginia, is also suing the city in federal court on behalf of residents who have objected to being surveilled by the cameras without any meaningful judicial oversight. The organization established a national database charting problems including unauthorized access by officers using the tracking data to stalk former romantic partners, and instances of people being errantly stopped and held at gunpoint because of incorrect plate reads.
In San Jose, there are nearly 500 license-plate readers installed throughout the city, and the systems have strong support from Mahan and the City Council, who favor robust controls on the technology but align with police in extolling crime-fighting benefits they credit with milestones like a years-long 100% annual homicide solve rate.
“I really think our job is to regulate and strike the right balance between the public safety value of the tools we give officers and the public risk, whether that risk is privacy or otherwise,” Mahan said. “I think it would be a mistake to make this a binary choice between using or not using such a powerful tool that has helped us solve every homicide nearly four years running, solve kidnappings, and generally reduce crime in the city.”
In March, in step with Joseph, the City Council unanimously approved a clawback policy that reduced SJPD’s retention for plate data from one year to 30 days, and prohibits cameras from recording vehicles entering and leaving houses of worship, reproductive health clinics, or consulate offices.
The city’s position contrasts with other Bay Area jurisdictions – such as Mountain View, El Cerrito, Santa Cruz, Cupertino, Saratoga and Stanford University – that have either dropped or severely restricted use of Flock cameras, often in response to revelations that outside law enforcement agencies and federal authorities accessed camera data in possible violation of California law prohibiting state law enforcement from engaging in immigration enforcement.
San Jose has faced similar accusations with its Flock database. Foley said she is sensitive to those concerns, and believes that the city can forge a path that balances the risks and rewards.
“I think the provisions that we’re putting in place will, over time, bring back the trust of the community,” she said. “We don’t want this information to get into the hands of federal law enforcement or into the hands of ICE, nor do we want it to get into the hands of police officers who will be misusing the information.”
This is a developing story. Check back for updates.