Surveillance Watch Benicia

Public-records requests

What has been asked for, what came back, and what is late.

1 request has received no response at all past the deadline. Under Gov. Code §7922.535 an agency must determine within 10 calendar days whether it holds responsive records. San Francisco's Sunshine Ordinance (§67.25) requires next-business-day production for portions granted as an Immediate Disclosure Request.

ReferenceAgencyWhat was asked for FiledLast responseNext dueStatusDocs
PR-2025-159 City of Benicia Caltrans encroachment permit, contract, transparency portal 2025-08-16 2026-02-14 produced 155
PR-2025-200 City of Benicia Camera locations and deployment maps 2025-09-08 2025-10-02 produced 5
Collected 2026-07-26. Five records including a 13-page per-device inventory (cameras #01–#51 with uptime, operational status and last service date, locations redacted) and a camera placement map presented to the public. Confirms 51 cameras: #49 decommissioned, #50 in permitting, one offline at 5% uptime. See camera-inventory.csv.
PR-2025-271 City of Benicia ALPR usage statistics 2025-12-04 2025-12-12 produced
Answered 2025-12-12 with statistics in the body of the response letter — no documents produced, and none available on the portal, so the document count is 0 by nature. Marked FINAL. Flock was referenced in 408 incidents / 234 cases in 2023, 675 / 226 in 2024, and 878 / 178 in 2025 (through 12/11) — references in incidents up 115% while cases fell 24%, against total incidents up 3.5%. The letter reports references only; the clearance question the request asked was not answered. See PRODUCTION-NOTE.md and usage-statistics.csv.
PR-2025-254 City of Benicia Raw ALPR data — denied 2025-11-09 2025-11-20 no-records
PR-2025-199 City of Benicia The ALPR policy file, 2018–2025 2025-09-08 2026-07-25 partial · rolling 89
Rolling partial release with redactions; the City has continued to produce.
PR-2026-7 City of Benicia Flock correspondence; camera-share solicitations 2026-01-07 2026-07-25 partial · rolling 127
Rolling release. The 2026-07-25 re-release added 31 documents beyond the 2026-07-11 one.
PR-2026-155 City of Benicia 88 data-sharing acknowledgment letters + quarterly audits 2026-06-24 2026-07-21 2026-08-07 partial · rolling 97
Closed for ambiguity, then REOPENED 2026-07-22 after a Gov. Code §7922.600 challenge. The reopened portion asks whether national/statewide lookup is switched on, and how those settings can be bypassed. Response due 2026-08-07.
P264292-071126 San Francisco PD NCRIC/WSIN audit + list of 531–763 affected agencies 2026-07-11 none overdue 13d
No response of any kind on record.
PR-2026-180 City of Benicia Flock Network Audit log + NCRIC notification trail 2026-07-11 2026-07-21 2026-08-14 partial · rolling
First phase collected 2026-07-26: 87 PDFs in a folder named "BPD Sharing With MOU's" — every one byte-identical to a document already produced under PR-2026-155. No Network Audit log and no NCRIC notification trail, which is what the request sought. Camera locations withheld under Gov. Code §7923.600(a) and the §7922.000 balancing test. Next update promised 2026-08-14.
PR-2026-189 City of Benicia Leonardo/ELSAG + SignalTrace device-identifier correlation 2026-07-18 2026-07-28 2026-08-21 partial · rolling 29
First phase collected 2026-07-28: 29 email printouts, all matching on the bare token "Leonardo" — 17 of them Leonardo.Ai marketing, Leonardo da Vinci, Leonardo DiCaprio or Leonardo S.p.A. The City produced its own tasking emails, which state the search terms and show the search was run unscoped across all City mail. Six records are genuinely responsive, all unsolicited vendor marketing. Nothing responsive to items 1, 3 or 4 (contracts, pilots, device-identifier retention). Next update promised 2026-08-21.
PR-2026-181 City of Benicia ALPR sharing roster + §470.9 audits 2026-07-11 none 2026-08-05 extended
Responded on the deadline with a §7922.535(c) extension — 'voluminous' records.
PR-2024-93 City of Benicia §470.8 ALPR audit memoranda, 2021–2024 2024-05-16 produced 1
The City did produce these, on 2024-05-16; they were not collected into this archive until 2026-07-26. The single PDF contains ten memoranda covering 2021-11 to 2024-04. It closes what had looked like a multi-year gap in the audit series: combined with PR-2026-155 the series is unbroken, 18 quarterly audits from November 2021 to April 2026. See finding 8.

How these were filed

All requests went directly to the agency — Benicia through its JustFOIA portal, San Francisco through GovQA. Benicia does not accept requests submitted through MuckRock, so deadline tracking here is maintained by hand rather than by a filing service.

That refusal is worth noting on its own. The California Public Records Act does not let an agency dictate the channel a request arrives through, and a requester is not required to identify themselves (Gov. Code §7921.000 et seq.). An agency that rejects requests solely because they came via a third-party service is on questionable ground.

What is still outstanding

The single most valuable record not yet produced is Benicia’s Flock Network Audit export — the log of every external agency search run against Benicia’s cameras. The data owner can run it on demand. If entries from NCRIC, the Western States Information Network, or out-of-state and federal agencies appear there, that answers directly whether Benicia’s data travelled the network involved in San Francisco’s disclosed misuse.