The American Civil Liberties Union Foundation of San Diego and Imperial Counties announced a lawsuit Wednesday against the city of San Diego and the San Diego Police Department over the use of Flock Safety Automated License Plate Reader (ALPR) technology.
The local ACLU group is representing the Partnership for the Advancement of New Americans, or PANA. Leaders from these groups held a press conference outside the Hall of Justice Courthouse in downtown San Diego on Wednesday to announce the lawsuit.
They’re seeking a court order telling the city to end the use of ALPRs, remove Flock and other cameras and delete all data collected.
“We know across the nation, women seeking reproductive health, our friends in the LGBTQ+ community attending pride parades, protesters that don't like what immigration enforcement is doing across the country — all of these people have been targeted, we know, by these cameras so that they can be prosecuted and persecuted and singled out further,” San Diego’s ACLU Legal Director Frederick Carroll said at a press conference Wednesday.
Carroll said the use of ALPRs violates Article 1 of the California state constitution, which guarantees, among other things, a right to privacy.
Flock Safety and Mayor Todd Gloria’s office have not responded to a request for comment. A San Diego Police Department spokesperson said it cannot comment on pending litigation.
Homayra Yusufi, senior policy strategist at PANA, said that as immigrant communities are being targeted by federal enforcement agencies, the use of ALPRs only adds to their fear.
“It is impossible to safeguard our data to ensure that our information is not being shared with these immigration enforcement agencies and other departments that actually could harm our immigrant communities,” Yusufi said.
The city’s contract with Flock became a focal point of this year’s budget discussion, as members of the public expressed strong concerns about surveillance and data sharing, while others praised the cameras for assisting law enforcement.
The San Diego City Council was also split on the issue, but ultimately approved a budget that kept the city’s contract with Flock in place.
In 2025, SDPD said they would stop sharing ALPR data with federal authorities and other out-of-state agencies after California Attorney General Rob Bonta’s office told the Department this likely violated state law.
A few months later, a KPBS investigation revealed local law enforcement agencies were accessing private ALPR data with little oversight. Police were found to have access to camera systems operated by retailers and shopping malls, homeowners associations, and even car dealerships, without the guardrails that are in place for public ALPR systems.
