21 Asked whether outside agencies could reach Benicia's cameras, staff answered with a 50-mile setting. The roster runs 500 miles.new

February 2026: the question, four months early

Benicia’s ALPR reckoning is usually dated to June 2026, when SFPD cut NCRIC off. The record now shows the same questions being asked inside City Hall on 2026-02-04, prompted by Mountain View police suspending their Flock program after federal agencies reached their data.

Mayor Steve Young wrote to Chief Menesini and Deputy Chief Criado, copying City Manager Mario Giuliani:

“You may be aware that the Mountain View police chief suspended their use of Flock cameras due to Flock’s settings allowing outside agencies to access the city’s data without authorization.

Can we check that the ’nationwide’ and ‘statewide’ settings have not been used by Flock for any of our data?”

He then relayed two questions from a resident:

“Can we get our settings verified with a log/dates for any changes, and by whom? The other question was about the frequency of audits and whether we can do them more frequently.”

The answer

At 10:26 the same morning, Police Records Supervisor Suzie Kaluza replied to Sergeant Mark Simonson, copying Wendy Stratton Monahan:

“In reviewing our Flock settings, all auto approve settings are disabled and our network discoverability is set to a 50 mile radius. The statewide and nationwide discoverability settings are disabled. (screenshots are below). I have also attached a list of all agencies we share with and agencies that share with us.”

The screenshots bear this out. Auto Approve Requests by Radius is Disabled. Under Network Discoverability, Within 50 Miles is on; Within My State and Within Nationwide are both off.

Every word of that is accurate. Two things follow from it that were not said.

What “discoverability” governs

Flock’s own text on the same screen defines it:

“Enabling this preference will make this network discoverable to Law Enforcement agencies, excluding Federal organizations, based on the selected distance, so that other organizations can request access to your camera data.”

Discoverability controls who can find Benicia and ask. It does not control who already has access. An agency granted access before the radius was set, or approved individually, is unaffected by it.

The roster published on Benicia’s own transparency portal, captured 2026-08-28, shows how far apart those two things are. Among the 75 organizations granted access:

Agency	Approximate distance from Benicia
Riverside County DA	~450 mi
Murrieta PD	~470 mi
San Diego County DA	~500 mi
El Cajon PD	~500 mi
Irvine PD · Newport Beach PD · Santa Ana PD	~430 mi
Upland PD · West Covina PD	~400 mi
City of Lemoore	~200 mi
Monterey County SO	~130 mi

Nine Southern California agencies hold access to cameras whose discoverability radius is fifty miles. Nothing about that is improper, since every one is a California law-enforcement agency, which is what the City’s policy requires. But it means the 50-mile figure answers a narrower question than the Mayor asked. He asked whether outside agencies could reach Benicia’s data. The setting he was shown describes who can send a request.

The question that was not answered at all

The resident’s question was specific: “a log/dates for any changes, and by whom?”

Kaluza’s reply supplied screenshots of the settings as they stood that morning. A screenshot is a snapshot, not a history. It cannot show whether a setting was different in January, who changed it, or when.

That question went unanswered on 2026-02-04, and it was still unanswered five months later. On 2026-08-07 the City told a requester under PR-2026-155 that it “has not been able to identify” any log of changes to those settings.

There is now a plausible reason for that, and it is not a Benicia failure. Flock has publicly conceded that “due to earlier limitations in technical logging, in some cases it is impossible to determine a specific cause” of changes to sharing configuration. If the vendor was not logging configuration changes, no amount of searching by the City would produce the log the resident asked for. Whether Benicia was told this, and when, is not in any production. It should be asked.

July 2026: the Mayor is still asking

The pattern continues. On 2026-07-13 Young forwarded the news that LAPD was ending its Flock agreement to Menesini, Giuliani and Criado, with one line:

“I would be interested in what new language they are considering for this.”

Across February, June and July 2026, the Mayor asked four separate times about outside access, change logs, cutting NCRIC off, and contract language. The productions contain the questions. They contain far less by way of answers.