Good Shepherd Media · Santa Clarita, California · Government Spying · Editorial & Investigation

Flock Cameras in Santa Clarita: The License Plate Reader Dragnet Tracking Every Car You Drive — and Why We Say It Violates the 4th and 14th Amendments

The City of Santa Clarita leases dozens of AI-powered Flock Safety license plate readers that photograph every vehicle that passes, build a searchable “fingerprint” of your car, and log where you have been — at locations the Sheriff’s Station refuses to disclose. Volunteers mapped them anyway. Search your own street below, see what these cameras collect, and read why we believe this is precisely the surveillance state the Constitution was written to prevent.

Good Shepherd Media Editorial Board · Santa Clarita, CA · September 7, 2026 · Est. reading time: 11 minutes

You didn’t consent to this. You were never asked. But if you drove to church on Sunday, to the pharmacy on Tuesday, or to a friend’s house on Friday night, there is a very good chance a camera bolted to a pole somewhere in Santa Clarita photographed your car, read your plate, logged the time and place, and filed it in a private company’s database where any deputy with a login can search it — no warrant, no judge, no suspicion required.

The cameras are made by Flock Safety, a venture-backed Atlanta company that has become the largest seller of automated license plate readers (ALPRs) in the United States. In November 2024, the Santa Clarita City Council approved a two-year lease of 35 Flock cameras for roughly $261,250, with renewals allowed up to $511,250, to be operated by the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department’s Santa Clarita Valley station. By March 2025 the station said all 35 were installed. Where? The station told the local paper it would rather not say, citing the safety of the cameras.

The government that answers to you has placed surveillance equipment on public streets, paid for with your money, and decided that you are not entitled to know where it is watching you from.

Live map: Flock cameras and license plate readers in Santa Clarita

The Sheriff’s Station may not publish a list, but the cameras stand on public right-of-way in plain view, and a nationwide volunteer effort called DeFlock has been documenting them one by one into OpenStreetMap. This map pulls that data live every time the page loads. Red dots are Flock Safety cameras; gold dots are other or unlabeled license plate readers. The faint wedge shows which direction the lens faces. Click any dot for details. Type your ZIP code or street address to see every reader near your home, your church, or your child’s school.

Flock Cameras: A Warrantless Dragnet on Every Road

Flock Safety license plate readers photograph every car that passes — plate, make, color, bumper stickers, dents — and store where you were and when in a private database that police search with no warrant, no judge, and no suspicion. Santa Clarita leases 35 of them and won’t say where they are. Volunteers mapped them anyway.

• Fourth Amendment. A permanent, searchable log of everyone’s movements is a search. The Supreme Court said so for cell-phone location data in Carpenter (2018) and again in Chatrie (2026). A camera on every chokepoint is the same dragnet on a pole.
• Fourteenth Amendment. No notice, no hearing, no vote — the public was never told where the cameras are. And a tool any logged-in user can point at any group, with no judge in between, is not equal protection of the laws.

Search your ZIP or address below. Red dots are Flock cameras; gold are other license plate readers. Every one records you.

Look at where they sit. Not scattered at random — at the chokepoints. The freeway approaches. The arterials every neighborhood drains into. The parking lot exits. As of this writing the community data shows 67 license plate readers inside Santa Clarita — 34 tagged as Flock Safety hardware and 33 from other vendors or not yet identified — every one of them with a recorded facing direction. That is nearly double the 35 the city leased, which tells you the city contract is only part of the picture: homeowners associations, shopping centers, and other agencies are running their own. If you leave your neighborhood the same way each morning, you are passing the same camera every day. That is not a tool for finding a stolen car. That is a net.

What is a Flock camera, and what does it actually record?

A Flock Safety camera is a solar-powered, cellular-connected license plate reader, usually mounted on a black pole or an existing traffic signal, aimed at the rear plates of passing cars. Flock’s marketing says its cameras “just read license plates.” The City of Santa Clarita’s own staff report says otherwise. The cameras, in the city’s words, employ machine learning and artificial intelligence to capture vehicle characteristics beyond the plate — color, make, body type, roof racks, bumper stickers, dents — so that a vehicle can be searched for even when no plate number is known. Flock calls this a “Vehicle Fingerprint.” A single camera can process up to 30,000 vehicles a day.

Every one of those 30,000 captures is a record of an innocent person going about their life. The camera does not know or care whether you are a fugitive or a grandmother. It records everyone and sorts it out later — which is to say, it records everyone and keeps it. Once uploaded, the data lives on Flock’s servers, and any officer with credentials can search it — and, depending on the sharing settings the agency chooses, so can hundreds of other agencies around the country through Flock’s national network.

Santa Clarita’s Flock camera program, by the numbers

Why we believe Flock cameras violate the Fourth Amendment

The Fourth Amendment guarantees “the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures.” For most of American history the government could not follow you everywhere you went because doing so was expensive: it took a deputy, a car, and a lot of coffee. That cost was itself a protection. Flock cameras erase it. For a few thousand dollars a pole, the government now follows everyone, everywhere, all the time, and stores the result.

The Supreme Court has already recognized this danger. In Carpenter v. United States (2018) it held that the government needs a warrant to obtain historical cell phone location records, because a record of “the whole of a person’s movements” reveals their “familial, political, professional, religious, and sexual associations.” This summer, in Chatrie v. United States, the Court went further, holding by a 6–3 vote that pulling a person’s location data is a search even when investigators only take a narrow slice of a much larger database — the exact argument cities have used to defend their camera networks.

We will be honest about the state of the law, because our readers deserve it. In January 2026, a federal judge in Norfolk, Virginia ruled that that city’s network of 176 Flock cameras did not yet violate the Fourth Amendment, because with 21-day retention and gaps in coverage it did not capture the “whole” of a person’s movements. The same judge warned in the same opinion that ALPR surveillance could cross the line “at some point.” In that case, the city’s own data showed the two plaintiffs’ cars — two ordinary people, no warrant, no charges — had been photographed hundreds of times in four months. The plaintiffs have appealed to the Fourth Circuit, and the Institute for Justice has filed a similar Fourth Amendment suit against San Jose, right here in California.

“Not today,” the judge wrote. We say: what is the number, then? How many cameras, how many days of retention, before a free people are entitled to say the government may not build a searchable record of where every one of us has been?

Santa Clarita has already decided the answer for us, without asking. We believe the courts will eventually catch up to what common sense already knows: a permanent, warrantless, city-wide log of the movements of every innocent driver is an unreasonable search, whether the judge in Norfolk is ready to say so or not.

The Fourteenth Amendment: due process and equal protection

The Fourteenth Amendment promises that no state shall deprive any person of liberty without due process of law, nor deny any person the equal protection of the laws. Both promises are broken here.

No notice, no hearing, no vote

Due process starts with notice. Santa Clarita installed a surveillance network on public streets and refused to tell the public where it is. There was no hearing on whether residents wanted to be tracked, no public vote, no meaningful opportunity to object — only a line item on a council agenda approved after “some debate.” The city cannot deprive you of the liberty to move about anonymously in your own town and then deny you even the information needed to understand what was taken.

A dragnet that falls on whoever the person at the keyboard chooses

Equal protection is the promise that the law falls on everyone alike. But a camera network at neighborhood chokepoints does not fall on everyone alike; it falls hardest on whoever the person at the keyboard decides to look for. Around the country, Flock data has been used to track a woman across state lines over an abortion and to feed federal immigration enforcement — in Mountain View, California, city officials discovered federal and state agencies had searched their cameras without consent. That revelation is why Santa Clara County voted in February 2026 to drop Flock entirely, why Los Altos Hills pulled its cameras down in January, and why by one count more than 90 cities nationwide have rejected or canceled Flock contracts. When a tool can be pointed at any group by any logged-in user with no judge in between, “equal protection” becomes whatever the person searching decides it is.

California’s Constitution says privacy is inalienable — and Sacramento did nothing

California’s own Constitution goes further than the federal one: Article I, Section 1 names privacy as an inalienable right of every Californian. And yet, as CalMatters reported this week, the Legislature has now failed for the fifth straight year to pass meaningful regulation of these cameras; this year’s bill, SB 1013, died without a vote. The people who could set the limits have declined to. That leaves it to cities — and to us.

The 1984 surveillance state, built one pole at a time

George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four is usually invoked lazily. We invoke it precisely. Orwell’s insight was not that the telescreen was always watching; it was that no one could ever be sure whether it was, and so everyone behaved as if it were. That is the effect of a camera network whose locations are secret and whose data is searchable at will. You do not have to be guilty of anything to change where you drive, whom you visit, which meeting you attend, which church or clinic or lawyer’s office you pull into. You only have to know that someone could look.

A community of free people does not have to accept this. We are told the cameras help deputies with staffing shortages; we are told they find stolen cars. Perhaps. Every surveillance state in history has been able to point to a criminal it caught. The question a constitutional republic asks is different: what does it cost the innocent, and who gets to decide? In Santa Clarita, so far, the answer to the second question has been “not you.”

What Santa Clarita residents can do about Flock cameras

1. Speak at City Council. The Flock lease is a two-year contract with renewal options. Renewal is a vote. Show up, put your name on the record, and ask each councilmember whether they will vote to renew warrantless tracking of their own constituents.
2. Demand the audit logs. California’s ALPR statute (Civil Code §1798.90.5 et seq.) requires every ALPR operator to maintain a usage and privacy policy and to log who accessed the data and why. File a California Public Records Act request with the City of Santa Clarita and the SCV Sheriff’s Station for the Flock usage policy, the search/access logs, and every outside agency the data has been shared with.
3. Map the cameras. If there is a reader on your street that isn’t on the map above, photograph it and add it at deflock.org. Secrecy is the program’s first defense; a complete public map takes it away.
4. Ask your HOA and your shopping center. Nearly half the readers mapped in this city are not the city’s. Ask who owns the one at your gate, what it keeps, and who can search it.
5. Sign, and tell your neighbors. Resident petitions to remove the cameras — including “Remove Flock Cameras from Santa Clarita” and “DeFlock SCV” — are circulating. Signatures alone won’t do it, but they tell the council which way the wind is blowing.

We will keep this map live and this story updated. If you have information about how Santa Clarita’s camera data has been accessed or shared, contact Good Shepherd Media.

Frequently asked questions about Flock cameras in Santa Clarita