Petition urges Humboldt County to remove Flock ALPR cameras

A new petition circulating on social media is asking Humboldt County to end its contract with Flock Safety and remove automated license plate-reading cameras from county jurisdiction, turning a long-running privacy dispute into a direct challenge to county leaders. The demand reaches both the Humboldt County Sheriff’s Office and the Humboldt County Board of Supervisors, signaling that critics see the issue as a countywide governance problem, not just a law-enforcement tool.

The petition comes after months of tension over how the county’s ALPR system is run and who can reach the data it collects. The sheriff’s office implemented the county program in April 2024, and later disclosures said nearly 300 outside law-enforcement agencies were able to run hundreds of thousands of searches per month of Humboldt ALPR data. The same material said the sheriff’s portal listed 293 California law-enforcement agencies with access, even though those monthly outside searches were not publicly shown there.

At the center of the argument is whether the county’s privacy rules are keeping pace with the technology. The sheriff’s office policy says it exclusively contracts with Flock Safety for ALPR equipment, processing, maintenance, storage and purging, and says the policy is meant to recognize the public’s privacy rights. California law requires ALPR operators to maintain reasonable security procedures and safeguards against unauthorized access, use, modification or disclosure, and state guidance issued by Attorney General Rob Bonta on October 30, 2023 told agencies to make sure collection, storage, sharing and use of ALPR information comply with state law.

The legal backdrop also includes SB 34, which requires a public agency to provide an opportunity for public comment at a regularly scheduled public meeting before implementing an ALPR program. That matters in Humboldt County because the debate has already moved beyond whether the cameras can help with investigations and into whether the county has enough oversight to keep the system narrowly used and lawfully shared.

Local resistance to plate readers is not new. Eureka City Council unanimously rejected a proposal to install license-plate-reading cameras in February 2025, even as the county sheriff’s office continued expanding its own program. Civil-liberties groups have also warned that sharing ALPR data with out-of-state agencies can violate California law, a concern that has only sharpened attention on access, transparency and the county’s ability to police its own data-sharing rules.

For Humboldt County, the petition is less a one-off protest than a test of public trust. The core question is whether the sheriff’s office can prove that Flock ALPR cameras are a public-safety asset with tight enough limits, or whether the system has already outgrown the guardrails meant to control it.