Hundreds of emails obtained by The Times through public records requests reveal how LAPD boosters, homeowner associations and elected officials have engaged in a months-long campaign to pressure the Bureau of Street Lighting to speed up installations of the plate readers.<\/p>\n
Flock, headquartered in Atlanta, said that it contracts with roughly 5,000 U.S. law enforcement agencies nationwide, and that its technology complies with a California law that limits what information can be shared with federal authorities. A company spokesperson said that Flock\u2019s technology is \u201cbuilt around transparency, accountability, and local control.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cOur customers own and control their data, which is deleted after 30 days by default,\u201d the spokesperson, MoMo Zhou, said in a statement to The Times. \u201cOur platform includes safeguards like audit trails to help ensure accountability at every step. Every day, Flock supports communities across the country in addressing crime and locating missing people.\u201d <\/p>\n
The Bureau of Street Lighting, with 177 employees and a relatively modest budget of $49.4 million, would seem an unlikely player in the broader debate over police surveillance. It is primarily tasked with repairing and fortifying the city\u2019s more than 210,000 streetlamps \u2014 a frequent target of copper wire thieves \u2014 and maintaining its network of electrical vehicle charging stations. <\/p>\n
The push to put up more plate readers has come amid calls for greater transparency around the Los Angeles Police Department\u2019s dealings with Flock. In March, the Police Commission asked the department to report back<\/a> on what information the company\u2019s scanners collect and share. In recent months, the commission declined to approve donations of Flock cameras. <\/p>\n Members of the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition held a news conference to express opposition to Flock Safety, a license plate reader, ahead of a Los Angeles Board of Police Commissioners meeting on March 3, 2026. <\/p>\n (Genaro Molina \/ Los Angeles Times)<\/p>\n The commission ordered its inspector general to conduct an audit of the LAPD\u2019s use of license plate reader technology, with the findings expected to be released in the summer.<\/p>\n Recently, Councilmember Ysabel Jurado introduced a motion urging the commission to \u201crefrain from entering into any new Memoranda of Understanding, Contracts, or other Agreements, or implement any pilot programs with Flock Safety or its affiliates.\u201d LAPD officials said last month that the city attorney\u2019s office has been working on drawing up a formal contract with Flock.<\/p>\n Behind the scenes, though, the pressure to work with Flock has been ratcheting up from other council offices and community groups.<\/p>\n When a representative from Councilmember Katy Yaroslavsky\u2019s office emailed the streetlighting bureau urging speed, she received a response that said the installation process shouldn\u2019t be rushed because some city light poles can\u2019t support the weight of a Flock reader, which is normally powered by a solar panel.<\/p>\n \u201cThe last thing we need is to have a pole fall onto someone or something if there are high winds,\u201d the bureau\u2019s Clinton Tsurui wrote in the June 4, 2025, email.<\/p>\n In another exchange, Tsurui expressed frustration with a colleague who had offered what he thought was an overly optimistic timetable for installing new plate readers.<\/p>\n He wrote: \u201csmh, promising things we can\u2019t do is going to catch up with us one day.\u201d <\/p>\n The Los Angeles Police Foundation, a nonprofit group that has long bankrolled equipment for the LAPD and offered other support, has criticized delays in installing the Flock devices. Last year, the foundation facilitated the donation of dozens of Flock cameras, most of which ended up in affluent neighborhoods<\/a> on the city\u2019s Westside and in the San Fernando Valley.<\/p>\n Records show that in May 2025, Dana Katz, the foundation\u2019s executive director, reached out to the mayor\u2019s office with a request to waive permit and rental fees associated with installing the new readers. Katz wrote in an email that the extra expense of around $2,000 per device were \u201ccost prohibitive and detrimental to public safety.\u201d <\/p>\n Katz also pointed out that in some places, there are no city-owned poles on which to mount the devices \u2014 but offered a possible solution.<\/p>\n \u201cFlock has its own pole that has been accepted by the County of Los Angeles for these situations, and we would like the City to accept the use of them, too,\u201d she wrote to Robert Clark, the city\u2019s then-deputy mayor of public safety.<\/p>\n A few of L.A.\u2019s historic streetlights stand outside the Bureau of Street Lighting\u2019s office near Virgil Avenue and Santa Monica Boulevard.<\/p>\n (Jason Armond \/ Los Angeles Times)<\/p>\n Katz wrote Clark again on Aug. 6 to ask why officials were estimating a six-to-12-month wait for approval of new Flock readers on public property in the neighborhoods of Cheviot Hills and Brentwood Park, where there were no existing city poles to mount them. She noted that the county\u2019s engineering department had already approved the company\u2019s poles, and asked Clark whether there was a way for the city to \u201cpiggyback on these other entities\u2019 approvals in order to speed this up so that these neighborhoods don\u2019t have to wait so long for help in preventing these home invasions?\u201d<\/p>\n In the following weeks, Katz\u2019s emails took on an increasingly urgent tone. In one of her last messages, email records show, she told an aide she expected more help than the mayor\u2019s office was offering.<\/p>\n \u201cWith all due respect, the answers you have provided are completely generic and do not provide any guidance and direction as to how we can expedite this process,\u201d she wrote.<\/p>\n She added: \u201cI\u2019ve said it before, and I will say it again \u2014 these delays are harmful to public safety.\u201d<\/p>\n A spokesperson for the mayor\u2019s office told The Times that ultimately neither Clark nor the aide intervened on the Los Angeles Police Foundation\u2019s behalf.<\/p>\n Email records show Flock\u2019s courtship of the bureau dates at least to spring 2024, when the company agreed to donate two of its plate readers to help combat copper thefts.<\/p>\n Tsurui emailed LAPD Capt. Celina Robles to say that the company\u2019s executives had requested an in-person meeting with the bureau and the LAPD \u201cto discuss the benefits of this product and how it can benefit the city moving forward.\u201d<\/p>\n On June 24, 2024, a lobbyist from the D.C. firm Modern Fortis emailed Bureau of Street Lighting Executive Director Miguel Sangalang seeking to \u201cexplore a public-private partnership\u201d between Flock and the city. Sangalang took another meeting to discuss Flock a few months later with former City Councilmember Joe Buscaino, who after leaving City Hall had gone to work for Ballard Partners, a powerful Florida-based lobbying firm. <\/p>\n In January 2025, after wildfires devastated Pacific Palisades, Altadena and other areas, Flock stepped in again. The company agreed to donate more than 50 plate readers, free of charge for six months, to the wealthy Palisades area, where residents and law enforcement officials were on high alert<\/a> about potential theft.<\/a><\/p>\n A Flock Safety automated license plate reader in Costa Mesa.<\/p>\n (Courtesy of the city of Costa Mesa)<\/p>\n In the days and weeks that followed, city and police officials continued to pepper the bureau about speeding up the approval process.<\/p>\n On Jan. 21, 2025, records show, Cmdr. Randall \u201cRandy\u201d Goddard of the LAPD\u2019s Information Technology Bureau wrote streetlighting officials to say that the Palisades community \u201ccould use a big favor from your department.\u201d<\/p>\n LAPD Chief Jim McDonnell \u201cfully supports this and has been working with the City Attorney\u2019s office to finalize the terms,\u201d Goddard wrote. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Since its creation more than a century ago, the Los Angeles Bureau of Street Lighting has been in…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":352984,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[4793,3015,1409,1804,144134,217,19944,35940,144136,48,52,51,5015,18339,47,50,49,4415,346,80892,144135],"class_list":["post-352983","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-los-angeles","tag-approval","tag-bureau","tag-city","tag-company","tag-dana-katz","tag-day","tag-email","tag-flock","tag-flock-safety-device","tag-la","tag-la-headlines","tag-la-news","tag-lapd","tag-license-plate-reader","tag-los-angeles","tag-los-angeles-headlines","tag-los-angeles-news","tag-mayor","tag-office","tag-police-commission","tag-robert-clark"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/352983","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=352983"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/352983\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/352984"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=352983"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=352983"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=352983"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"People](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/1781005046_972_.jpeg\")
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