Every time a vehicle, bike or motorcycle enters or exits Cal Poly’s campus, it’s being tracked, often without the driver knowing.
Its license plate is scanned and make and model noted, along with the exact date, time and location by a network of license plate readers monitored by the Cal Poly Police Department.
The readers also record each car’s color, any present damage, bumper stickers and type of tire, allowing cameras to identify vehicles based on cosmetics rather than just a license plate.
In March 2025, Cal Poly signed a contract with Flock safety, installing license plate readers and live video cameras at all campus vehicle entrances and exits, according to university spokesperson Matt Lazier. The decision, which was made with limited community input, incited condemnation from students and staff who are concerned about Flock’s potential to have a negative impact on the security of the Cal Poly community.
What is Flock Safety?
Flock Safety, a controversial “public safety technology ecosystem,” manufactures license plate readers, drones, video cameras and audio detectors to provide “safety solutions” to neighborhoods, law enforcement agencies and businesses nationwide. Their license plate readers record billions of monthly reads, according to Flock’s website.
Cal Poly currently has 10 Flock license plate recognition cameras and seven Flock live video cameras, according to the contract between Flock Safety and Cal Poly obtained by Mustang News. At the time of contract signing, the university paid a fee of $42,500 to Flock. An annual fee of $46,500 is required to retain Flock’s technology on campus.
“As part of its continual efforts to enhance public safety on campus, the university chose to place security cameras to provide law enforcement with additional resources when investigating criminal activity,” Lazier wrote in an email to Mustang News.
Flock’s data is “community controlled,” meaning that footage collected on campus is owned by Cal Poly. Data is stored for 30 days and is accessible only by approved CPPD personnel, according to Lazier.
Jeffrey Lewis, Support Services Lieutenant for CPPD, has been designated as the automated license plate reader administrator, according to guidelines for Flock camera usage on CPPD’s website.
To increase police transparency and accountability with the public, Flock Safety launched a public-facing transparency portal that agencies that use Flock can opt-in to, according to Flock Safety’s website.
On Feb. 26, 2026, nearly a year after Cal Poly signed a contract with Flock Safety, CPPD decided to opt-in to a transparency portal. The cameras have detected 55,070 vehicles in the last 30 days, and CPPD has made 21 searches of the data, according to the portal. CPPD conducted 406 searches through Flock data from June 2025 to Feb. 3, 2026, according to Kevin Cushing, public records access officer.
Community reactions
Cal Poly had “general discussions” with ASI leadership before the Flock cameras were installed, according to Lazier. However, Mustang News found no formal Cal Poly announcement that Flock’s license plate recognition technology was to be utilized on campus.
Some students and staff are left wondering where the line is drawn between safety and surveillance.
Ryan Jenkins, philosophy professor and associate director of the Ethics + Emerging Sciences Group, says he is worried about the normalization of surveillance in general, especially the expectation that citizens have to “submit” to technology like Flock without knowledge or consent.
“We’re told that it’s being done in our interest and for our benefit. I think that it’s fair to demand more than that in terms of an explanation,” Jenkins said. “I think it’s fair to understand how the data are used, who has access to them, what real kind of technical safeguards we have.”
“We’re told that it’s being done in our interest and for our benefit. I think that it’s fair to demand more than that in terms of an explanation,”
Ryan Jenkins, philosophy professor and associate director of the Ethics + Emerging Sciences Group
Regardless of whether CPPD is trying to increase campus safety by implementing Flock cameras, Jenkins believes Flock is still a risk for the community.
To Jenkins, the danger that Flock might put the Cal Poly community in must be weighed against the potential benefits. It is concerning to him that the data Flock collects can be weaponized against Cal Poly students without CPPD or the university’s knowledge.
According to Jenkins, multiple communities have had their Flock data queried by the federal government by overriding settings put in place from police departments to allow them to access data without the department’s knowledge.
The Mountain View Police Department temporarily shut off their Flock cameras in January after finding that federal agencies accessed data from the cameras without the department’s knowledge, according to a press release from the city of Mountain View.
“That should be chilling to everyone on campus, even the people who have our safety as their primary mission,” Jenkins said.
Whenever personal data is amassed to the degree that Flock cameras are capable of, “that data is going to be very tantalizing for a lot of bad actors,” Jenkins said.
This can take the form of hackers who want to blackmail people, or even community members who have access to the data who then will use it for stalking, Jenkins explained.
Statewide adoption
Flock is involved with controversy over unlawful data sharing across California. In October 2025, California Attorney General Rob Bonta sued the city of El Cajon for sharing Flock data with federal and out-of-state law enforcement agencies according to the State of California Department of Justice website. Under California Senate Bill 34, sharing license plate recognition data with out-of-state or federal law enforcement is prohibited.
In San Francisco and Oakland, local law enforcement agencies have allegedly repeatedly violated this bill by sharing Flock data with federal law enforcement agencies, as previously reported by The San Francisco Standard.
Business administration freshman Tobias Halpern first became aware of the Flock license plate scanners when he returned from winter break this year. Back at home in the Bay Area, various police departments are using Flock cameras, and Halpern was alarmed to learn that Cal Poly was utilizing this technology too.
“It kind of pissed me off,” Halpern said. “I was like ‘woah, no way Cal Poly is putting these here.’ I thought that was just something big police departments did in like Oakland or Berkeley.”
Halpern decided to take action, creating a Change.org petition and educating fellow students about the technology through Reddit and Instagram. Halpern’s petition details his complaints with Flock’s technology use on campus and encourages Cal Poly’s administration to rethink its contract with Flock to protect student freedoms.
Halpern’s main concern with Flock Safety is abuse, especially sharing data with outside law enforcement in ways that disproportionately affect marginalized communities.
“Even though we have administrative policy of not sharing data with ICE, if they have a buddy that’s in ICE or any federal law enforcement agency, really, that’s not supposed to be shared data with, they could just do a search on their behalf,” Halpern said.
CPPD shares data with other law enforcement agencies on a case-by-case basis with the approval of Cal Poly’s chief of police. By Cal State policy and California state law, CPPD will not share data with immigration officers unless required by a court order, according to Lazier.
Flock, however, reserves the right to collect and anonymize customer data to train their “machine learning algorithms.” Flock can also share footage with law enforcement, government officials or third parties when legally required or if Flock has a “good faith belief” that such action is “reasonably necessary” to comply with legal obligations or address security and emergency issues, according to the contract between Flock and Cal Poly obtained by Mustang News.
To Jenkins, Flock claiming the right to indefinitely retain data is a red flag. If some degree of privacy is sacrificed for security by utilizing Flock on campus, he believes significant work needs to be done to ensure the sacrifice is minimal.
“It doesn’t mean that cameras are always the wrong move, but it means if you’re going to use them, we need bulletproof assurances about how that data is being collected and used,” Jenkins said.
This story originally appeared in the March printed edition of Mustang News. Check out more stories from the issue here.