Top image (representative): A Flock Safety automated license plate reader camera. Photo: Tony Webster / CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons
San Mateo has chosen to keep its automated license plate readers, but on new terms: a new vendor, a side-by-side trial, and much tighter limits on who can see the data. Peninsula cities are moving in different directions on this technology, and San Mateo’s approach may become the template for the cities that keep it.
The contract
On Oct. 5, the San Mateo City Council approved an eight-year purchase of Axon license plate reader cameras, the San Mateo Daily Journal reported. The deal starts with a free one-year trial, and payments do not begin until June 2028. Over six to nine months, the department will test Axon’s cameras side by side with its existing Flock system. The Daily Journal put the license plate reader portion at about $1.4 million, within a broader Axon agreement worth more than $8.4 million cumulatively that runs to June 2034.
The vote came with a condition. Councilmembers Lisa Diaz Nash and Fernandez tied their support to the city holding a public town hall on the technology by early next year, according to the Daily Journal.
“We have taken a very responsible approach to ALPR data in the city,” Police Chief Ed Barberini said, as quoted by the Daily Journal.
Fewer agencies, more audits
A companion Daily Journal report described the guardrails. The department has cut the number of outside agencies with access to its data from more than 280 to eight and removed university police departments from the list. Requests now require a case number, and the system is audited monthly. The paper also noted that the San Mateo County civil grand jury’s Aug. 3 report found no illegal out-of-state data sharing as of December 2025. Police partly credit the department’s real-time information center with helping reduce property crime by 25% and violent crime by 20% from 2024 to 2025.
The opposition
Critics are not satisfied. “Axon is Flock’s evil twin,” said Emily Morris of the group Safety Over Surveillance, according to the Daily Journal. “Mass surveillance cameras violate our civil rights,” she said.
Neighboring cities show how much this has become a judgment call. Redwood City dropped Flock after an audit covering April 2023 to May 2026 found out-of-state and federal access to its data, and Half Moon Bay let its Flock contract lapse, the Daily Journal reported.
The long view
License plate readers are an early test of how cities govern AI-adjacent surveillance. The hardware is cheap and the analytics improve every year, so the real policy questions are about data: retention, sharing, auditing, and who can query it. San Mateo’s answer is to keep the tool, cut the sharing network by more than 95%, and run a vendor bake-off before committing payments. That will be watched by cities that, like San Mateo, credit the technology with lower crime but face residents who distrust where the data goes. The town hall the council required may be the more important outcome.
Editor’s note: Figures and quotations are drawn from the San Mateo Daily Journal’s Oct. 10, 2026 reporting by Cecilia Schutz; South Bay Chronicle has not independently reviewed the contract.
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