California Attorney General warned police about license plate data law. Departments ignored him

The police department in Oakley, a city about 40 miles south of Sacramento, which The N&O found was sharing license plate data with at least seven out-of-state agencies — including in Texas and Arizona — has disagreed with the Attorney General’s view.

The Oakley PD was one of the two agencies to receive letters from the Attorney General’s Office asking the department to align its practices with state law or face legal action.

When asked recently about the department’s sharing of license plate data, Assistant City Manager Danielle Navarro told The Bee in an email: “We don’t have any comments at this time.”

Dave Gutierrez, a captain for the Menifee Police Department, said the agency is not following Bonta’s guidance.

“Criminals do not stop at jurisdictional boundaries and can often travel long distances to commit crimes,” the captain said in a statement. “The sharing of information is critical to good policing and protecting our communities.”

On the other hand, Donald Charles, the College of the Sequoias chief, said he was not aware of the October bulletin from Bonta’s office until he was asked by The Bee about the small agency’s sharing of Flock data. He decided to cut off access to non-California agencies after reviewing the notice, he said, and speaking with other chiefs of community college departments.

“It’s not going to change any business or functionality with the system,” Charles said.

At least one department identified in The N&O’s review reported not knowing its data was accessible outside California.

The police department for Seaside, near Monterey, granted access to 19 non-California agencies as of late May, the newspaper found, including ones in Georgia and New York. That wasn’t the department’s intention, Commander Matthew Doza told The Bee.

When the department requests access to information from other agencies, the system defaults to allow the other agencies to also have access to Seaside’s data, Doza said. A box needs to be unchecked to prevent that from occurring, the commander said, and sometimes that doesn’t happen.

Doza said the department would remove the access for non-California agencies.

“This is an awesome investigative tool,” the commander said, “and we don’t want to lose it.”

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