Mill Valley suspends its license plate cameras, citing changes to Flock’s terms

What’s happening: Mill Valley suspended its license plate readers and live-feed cameras, the city said in a statement posted Oct. 19. The city said Flock Safety changed its terms of use midway through the contract, raising concerns about its ability to control its data and enforce its privacy rules.

The revised terms did not provide the enforceable protections the city requires, the statement said. Both camera types have been off since Sept. 9, and the city plans to evaluate other vendors and return to the City Council in February 2027, the statement said.

Why it matters: The city says it supports plate readers to solve crimes, recover stolen vehicles and locate missing persons, but only with enforceable safeguards. The city’s statement says it did not use facial recognition, cut retention to 72 hours for live-feed cameras and seven days for plate readers, audited system access and required agencies to sign a data-sharing agreement before getting data.

Mill Valley’s own data is gone, Vice Mayor Caroline Joachim told the Briefing: everything its cameras captured has passed the retention period and been purged. Flock’s transparency page for Mill Valley showed zero vehicles detected in the previous 30 days as of Oct. 20, consistent with the cameras being off.

Mill Valley police can still technically search other agencies’ plate-reader networks during investigations where a sharing agreement exists, Joachim said. Flock transparency pages for Belvedere, Sausalito and the Marin County Sheriff’s Office list Mill Valley PD among the agencies with access and show 30-day retention. Other agencies’ access to Mill Valley’s data “is technically still on, but it is not ‘live’ per se,” Joachim said. With the data purged, there is nothing for them to search.

Central Marin Police Authority announced in August it will not renew its Flock contract when it expires in October. Tiburon still runs its cameras. Its Flock transparency page, updated Oct. 20, shows 103,310 vehicles detected in the previous 30 days and lists 208 agencies with access to its data. An Ark audit published Sept. 21 found 34 outside agencies ran 8,542 searches of Tiburon’s cameras in the first seven months of 2026 whose stated reasons named federal agencies or programs. Police Chief Michelle Jean told The Ark in February that a federal agency named in a search reason does not necessarily indicate data was shared illegally.

The context: The City Council voted 5-0 on Feb. 24, 2025 to approve the Flock system, the meeting minutes show. Police Chief Rick Navarro’s staff report sought a two-year contract for six plate readers and two live-video cameras at $50,400. Lt. Sean McCracken told the council the department’s old system had become obsolete and left Mill Valley as a gap in the county. He said the cameras use no facial recognition, that state law bars sharing with immigration enforcement and out-of-state agencies, and that Navarro intended to cut the department’s one-year retention policy to 30 days.

Joachim said on Feb. 24 that staff had addressed her concerns about privacy, retention and sharing and said she expected updates through the Police Governance Committee. Then-Mayor Burke asked to hear from the department in a year, and then-Vice Mayor Perrey asked for a full agenda item at the two-year renewal. Navarro said he intended to report quarterly to the Police Governance group.

According to multiple councilmembers, Mill Valley was the last jurisdiction on the 101 corridor to adopt Flock. Navarro’s staff report said residents had urged the department to install plate readers. It said city staff, police and residents had once doubted that fixed readers worked, but that the technology had since proven effective in solving crimes across the country and in Marin. It called Mill Valley “the gap in the county.” It said Flock proposed 15 readers and that the department asked for six, at three locations on the city’s main entry and exit routes, to test whether the system worked.

The debate: One year after the council approved the cameras, on Feb. 2, 2026, Joachim told the council that concerns about Flock elsewhere had come from local agencies that voluntarily shared data with federal agencies or opted into nationwide networks. Mill Valley, she said, had opted out of nationwide and statewide lookup tools, monitored three entry and exit points and had no known data breaches.

She credited resident Justice Rosen’s public comments, along with articles about Flock, with prompting the Police Governance Subcommittee, which she sits on with Councilmember Urban Carmel, City Manager Todd Cusimano and Chief Navarro, to revisit policies.

Beyond opting out of nationwide lookup, Mill Valley kept its sharing list short. A Flock transparency page lists every agency that can search a department’s cameras. Mill Valley’s page listed six in August, while the cameras were running. On Oct. 20, Sausalito’s listed 277 and Tiburon’s 208.

Flock rewrote its online terms in February, The Ark reported, deleting its indemnification obligations and moving every dispute to Georgia law and binding arbitration. Flock announced Aug. 13 it would cut default retention for new customers to seven days from 30, require a case number on every law-enforcement search by year’s end and make its misuse-detection tool mandatory.

Ars Technica described the change as coming after extensive criticism. By Aug. 28, Secure Justice, an Oakland advocacy group, had counted 93 U.S. cities and counties ending Flock contracts that month, roughly four times July’s total, Ars reported. Flock told Ars that new city partnerships have outpaced nonrenewals by about 10 to one this year.

Corte Madera Councilmember Eli Beckman announced Aug. 14 that the Central Marin Police Authority, which polices Corte Madera, Larkspur and San Anselmo, would not renew its Flock contract in October.

The crossroads: As the Briefing reported Aug. 30, City Manager Cusimano told the council at its Aug. 17 meeting “there’s issues with the contract that we’re concerned about,” but said staff knew of no proven violations. He said the city was at “a crossroads.” If Flock made the requested amendments, staff would recommend keeping the contract until it ends in February. If not, he said, he expected staff and the Police Governance Subcommittee to recommend suspending it and bringing back alternatives. He expected Flock’s answer within two weeks.

Resident Jeremy Revitch, who has pressed the issue in person at several council meetings, spoke again that night. He said he runs a company that sells and installs video surveillance systems and told the council the contract’s “only enforceable term is what the city pays. Everything else, including the privacy protections this council was promised, Flock can change at any time and has.” Carmel thanked him for his engagement and for looking out for his community.

Joachim, whom Revitch said he had been working with on the issue for nearly two months, told the Briefing in August that the two-week window tested whether Flock would put its privacy commitments “into enforceable terms.” If not, she said, “the City should be prepared to suspend the program and consider alternatives.”

After the Sept. 8 meeting, Joachim told the Briefing, city officials met with Flock and asked for legally binding assurances on “the ownership, sale, sharing and use of data.” Flock’s attestation, she said, confirms the city owns its data and acknowledges the city’s request that it not be used for “machine-learning purposes.” The difference, she said: “It’s a legal attestation versus amending the actual terms of use.”

Joachim told the Briefing that Flock revised its terms of use without the city’s consent, and the city’s statement says the revised terms did not give it the enforceable protections it requires.

The Briefing asked Flock on Oct. 20 what changed in its terms of use, whether it agreed to any of Mill Valley’s requested changes and what the status of the city’s account is.

Flock Media Relations Specialist Andrew Smith pointed to an Aug. 21 blog post by Chief Legal Officer Dan Haley announcing updates to its online terms. The post does not mention Mill Valley. It says the changes apply to customers whose agreements reference the online terms and “do not impact customers who have executed a static Master Services Agreement or other standalone agreement with Flock.” We will update the online version if Flock says more.

What’s next: The city’s statement lists five priorities for any replacement: access and data sharing, retention, auditing, transparency and vendor accountability. Among them, it calls for safeguards that prohibit statewide sharing and sharing California law bars, and for contract terms that give the city, not the vendor, control over data, settings and sharing permissions. Any proposal to resume use will come to council for public review and comment, the city’s statement said.

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Catherine Breed finished. The Mill Valley swimmer who trains in Richardson Bay came ashore at Coronado on Monday, and her team says she is the first person to swim the length of California’s coast: about 900 miles from the Oregon border in 111 days. She slept on a support boat, rounding Point Conception and crossing Monterey Bay in daily stages.

The record is not official: her team says ratification depends on a review of GPS and observer records. Breed wrote on social media that she swam more than two miles offshore near Imperial Beach to avoid sewage from the Tijuana River, and felt like she was “swimming through sewage.” She marks the end of the swim Wednesday at 4pm in Coronado, at an event with the conservation group WILDCOAST on border water pollution.