03 The public "transparency" page showed "system down" — and the city could edit it
Flock concluded the outage notice on Benicia's public audit page had been posted by the agency itself.
Flock markets a public “Transparency Portal” where residents can audit how police use the system. In early 2024 that portal’s audit area displayed a “system down” message. When the city asked Flock about it, the answer was revealing:
From: Flock Safety Support (“Rhianna”) — March 4, 2024 (to Jeremy Karagan, IT Analyst II, Benicia PD): “I have heard from our engineers! This area of the portal is editable by your organization, so our team suspects that someone from your organization put up this message. You should be able to remove it without issue.”
Why it matters: The public-facing accountability page is agency-editable, and — by Flock’s own account — a “system down” notice sitting on the audit page appears to have been posted from within the city. How long the public saw “system down” instead of real audit data, and who posted it, are open questions.
Caveat: this is Flock support’s stated suspicion, not a confirmed finding of who posted it.
Source: Re_ Transparency Portal Audit System Down (1).txt and related (PR-2025-159).
The documents behind this
Read them yourself — that is the point.
| Document | Request |
|---|---|
| Re_ Transparency Portal Audit System Down (1).pdf | PR-2025-159 |
| PR-2025-159/text/ — multiple documents in this request | PR-2025-159 |
Full write-up source: BENICIA-FLOCK-FINDINGS.md in the records archive. Every
quotation is transcribed from a PDF the City produced under the California Public Records
Act. Redacted and image-only scans were run through OCR, so minor spacing artifacts may
remain; wording is unchanged.