11 Officers were told to log only a case number — because the public reads the logsnew

On 2025-08-29, Deputy Chief Edward Criado emailed all sworn staff, dispatchers and command:

“I have removed the case number field because it seems too confusing for some people. There now will only be the Reason field. You must only enter a Case number or Cad number as a reason. You should not enter any words or explanation, only a case or cad number. If you don’t have that, you don’t search.”

The stated motivation is explicit:

“It is in the news and there are groups looking at our public search logs daily for opportunities to claim we are not following policy and cannot be trusted with this system. I don’t want to see that happen.”

The earlier email in the same thread (2025-07-02) had listed the rejected entries — “stolen plate flock hit,” “374.3 illegal dumping veh,” “Looking for suspect vehicle,” “488 PC” — and conceded: “All of these are connected to a case number or Cad number. These are legitimate searches.”

Why it matters. The “reason” field is what the public transparency portal displays. The change converts that column from human-readable purpose statements into bare internal identifiers that no member of the public can resolve. The department’s own framing ties the change to public scrutiny rather than to investigative need.

Stated fairly: officers were already required to tie searches to a case/CAD number, and descriptive free-text was already deemed non-compliant. What changed on 2025-08-29 is that the separate case-number field was removed and explanatory words were prohibited — so the public record now carries strictly less information than before.

Related, vendor side: on 2025-12-15 Flock announced (“Strengthening Transparency in Every Search”) that a NIBRS-based offense-type dropdown would become required, while “the ‘Search Reason’ field will remain as an optional way to add additional context.”

Evidence: PR-2025-199/text/RE_ALPR FLOCK Search field update EVERYONE read and reply to me that you read this.txt, PR-2026-7/text/Strengthening Transparency in Every Search.txt

Update, 2026-08-28: the portal’s own exports confirm the directive worked

Deputy Chief Criado’s email of 2026-08-29 listed the entries he considered unacceptable, quoting them from “the last 28 days”:

stolen plate flock hit · stolen plate search · 10851 vehicle · 374.3 illegal dumping veh · Looking for suspect vehicle · 488 PC

Those strings can be checked against the public search-audit exports the portal publishes, because several were captured before and after he sent it.

The exact phrases Criado singled out appear in the July and August 2025 windows and then stop. The directive did what it was written to do.

What that means for the public record is the point of this finding. The reason field is now almost entirely case numbers, and a case number tells a reader nothing about why a vehicle was searched. The portal is more compliant and less informative than it was, and both changes have the same cause.

It also answers a question the City says it cannot understand. In its 2026-08-28 response to PR-2026-211 the City asked the requester to rephrase an item seeking records showing whether the Department can identify, after the fact, which cases originated from an ALPR hit. The Department’s own published exports show a case number on 97 to 100% of searches, and the portal’s Access Policy states that “all system access requires a valid reason and is stored indefinitely.”