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.
| Reference | Agency | What was asked for | Filed | Last response | Next due | Status | Docs |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
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 | 1 |
| 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 | 2026-08-21 | 2026-09-18 | partial · rolling | 131 |
| Rolling partial release with redactions; the City has continued to produce. Third phase collected 2026-08-21: 124 files, 70 already held and 14 matching filenames already recorded as dedupe drops. 39 are new, and they are a different kind of record from the policy versions this request had been returning — direct agency-to-agency correspondence in which outside departments email Benicia asking for its ALPR sharing MOU. This is a separate channel from the in-platform share queue in PR-2026-7/share-requests.csv. Seven requesting agencies appear: SFPD (Ofc. Brandon Rock, Strategic Investigations Unit, 2024-06-11), Santa Ana PD (Det. Cpl. Britain Speakman, 2025-10-28 to 2025-11-06, ending with a signed agreement returned), Lakeport PD, West Covina PD, Irvine PD, Roseville PD and El Cajon PD. Three embedded attachments were new, including Roseville's signed ALPR Data Sharing Request & Agreement executed by Deputy Chief Edward Criado. One document is an audit rather than a request: Criado to Stratton Monahan and Hassler, 2025-09-02, reporting that Bakersfield and Newport Beach searches between January and July "all appear to be used appropriately and in compliance with the Benicia PD use agreement". Next update promised 2026-09-18. | |||||||
PR-2026-7 |
City of Benicia | Flock correspondence; camera-share solicitations | 2026-01-07 | 2026-07-25 | — | partial · rolling | 141 |
| Rolling release. The 2026-07-25 re-release added 31 documents beyond the 2026-07-11 one. Third phase collected 2026-08-21: 134 files, 120 already held, 14 new. All 14 are Flock corporate email to Lt. Heinemeyer and Deputy Chief Criado, December 2025 to January 2026, and five of them share a filename with a different document already held, so they carry a (2026-08-21) suffix recorded in rename-log.csv. Four form a dated sequence. On 2025-12-08 CEO Garrett Langley wrote that activists "are also trying to turn a public records process into a weapon against you and against us". On 2025-12-12, four days later, Flock removed officer names, specific plates and vehicle fingerprint information from Network Audit Logs, citing transparency being "weaponized"; Organization Audit Logs were left unchanged. On 2025-12-15 a mandatory NIBRS Offense Type dropdown replaced the free-text search reason, and Flock stated it would "replace the Free Text search reason in the Network Audit with the Offense Type". On 2026-01-27 it circulated Schmidt v. City of Norfolk. A fifth, 2025-12-23, is the Condor debug-interface exposure. Next update promised 2026-09-18. | |||||||
PR-2026-155 |
City of Benicia | 88 data-sharing acknowledgment letters + quarterly audits | 2026-06-24 | 2026-07-21 | 2026-09-04 | overdue | 98 |
| 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. The City answered on 2026-08-07, on the last day of the window, and produced no new documents — the accompanying download is byte-for-byte the production already held. On the configuration question it said a screenshot "amounts to creating a record, which the City declines to do at this time", and that it "has not been able to access an export or system report showing the current on/off status" of national lookup, nationwide and statewide search. On the change log and the bypass documentation it said only that it "has not been able to identify" and "has not located" them — not that they do not exist, which is what the request offered to accept. The letter then set the next update for August 21, 2027: a year and two months after the request was filed, and a year after the date the City gave on PR-2026-189. Asked to confirm or correct it, Kaluza replied on 2026-08-11 that the year was a typographical error and committed to August 21, 2026. **The City met that date**, responding on 2026-08-21 at 9:28 PM. Item 3, the bypass documentation, is now answered categorically -- "the City has no responsive records" -- which is the written confirmation of nonexistence the request had offered to accept, so that portion is closed. Item 1, the configuration state, is refused on two grounds at once: that there are no responsive records, and that a screenshot would be creating one. The letter adds a new factual assertion, that "there is not a function to export the information you requested" -- an answer on the facts to the Gov. Code §7922.570(a) and §7922.575(b) extraction argument, and one that can be tested against Flock's own documentation. Item 2, the change log, is extended again, and the phrase moves from "has not located" to "the record requested". Next update 2026-09-04. The subject line reads FINAL; the body does not. | |||||||
PR-2026-217 |
City of Benicia | The Flock communication on NCRIC sharing restrictions the Chief named but the City did not produce | 2026-08-08 | 2026-08-18 | 2026-08-18 det. | produced | 2 |
| Filed the same day the City's PR-2026-181 production was ingested. In an email of 2026-06-18 released in that production, Chief Menesini told Mayor Young "I'm going to forward you an email from Flock that specifically talks about the current restrictions that have been made limiting NCRIC's ability to share data." Neither that Flock communication nor the forward appears in the release. This request asks for both, plus any other Flock communication about NCRIC, WSIN or the June 2026 SFPD disclosure in case the Chief characterised it loosely. Filed as a new request rather than a follow-up because it could not have been asked for earlier — the record's existence was unknown until the City disclosed it — so it cannot be duplicative, and it carries its own §7922.535 clock rather than riding on the 2026-08-28 date the City set itself. Answered on the deadline and marked FINAL: "The City considers this request fulfilled." One document, and it is the one asked for. The forward is timed 11:35:16 on 2026-06-18, thirty-nine seconds after the message announcing it. The Flock email inside it is dated 2026-06-05, twelve days before the San Francisco disclosure was reported: Flock told Benicia it had "identified instances where user accounts associated with the NCRIC organization did not align with our current account provisioning requirements" and had "taken steps to restrict access to accounts that could not be validated". It does not say Benicia's data was accessed, it went to a Senior Management Analyst rather than the Chief, and its own footer marks it an advertisement. What it establishes is that the City held written notice of an NCRIC access problem before the story broke. It is not the research the Chief said was needed, and no record of that research has been produced by any request. | |||||||
P270464-082126 |
San Francisco PD | Flock Network Audit exports for May, June and July 2026 | 2026-08-21 | none | 2026-09-14 | extended | — |
| Follow-on to P264292-071126, filed as a separate request rather than as a follow-up so it carries its own Gov. Code §7922.535 clock. P264292 produced seventeen days past its own extended date and still has six of its seven items open. This one asks for a single thing: the same Flock Network Audit export the Department produced for April 2026 on 2026-08-21, for the three months that follow. The April file covers 2026-04-01 to 2026-05-01 and the WSIN memorandum produced alongside it describes conduct "during April and May 2026", so May is the month the memorandum actually describes and is not in hand. June is the month San Francisco cut off access. The request accepts the April redactions exactly, seeking no officer names and no plate numbers, which removes the review burden as a ground for delay. Filed from a registered portal account: P264292 was submitted anonymously with no email attached to the record, which is why four items of correspondence went unseen for five weeks and why the Sunshine Ordinance Task Force complaint had to be withdrawn. The acknowledgment for this request is addressed by name. **CORRECTED 2026-08-31.** This entry previously recorded the request as FULFILLED on or before 2026-08-22, one day after filing, and called it the fastest turnaround any agency in this archive had managed. That was wrong. The only basis for it was a status read off the GovQA portal by eye: no files were downloaded, no closing letter arrived, and no capture of the screen was kept. On 2026-08-31, the tenth day and the statutory determination date, SFPD Legal Division wrote on behalf of Acting Lieutenant Theodore Polovina #2456 invoking Gov. Code §7922.535(c)(1) & (2), "due to the need to search and review our records", and undertook to advise "within 14 days, but no later than September 14". The extension is timely. It is also not something a department does about a request it filled nine days earlier: nothing has been produced, and no determination has been made. The method claim goes with it -- that asking for a report already produced once, in the same format at the same redaction level, removes the disclosability determination and therefore the delay. It may still be true, but this request has not shown it, and the April export it copies took the Department seventeen days past its own extended date. Note where the earlier reading came from: the same portal, on the same date, is where the closure of P264292-071126 was observed, also by eye and also uncaptured. Whether 2026-08-22 was a workflow artifact, a display state following the portal-account registration of 2026-08-21, or a confusion between the two request records is not established and is not asserted here. The rule taken from it is that a portal status is not a production and does not enter this register without a capture attached. | |||||||
PD-2026-598 |
Roseville PD | Benicia's access to Roseville ALPR data, and the 60-day audit it agreed to | 2026-08-21 | none | 2026-08-31 det. | awaiting | 3 |
| Filed after an embedded attachment in the 2026-08-21 PR-2025-199 production turned out to be Roseville PD's ALPR Data Sharing Request and Agreement, executed for Benicia by Deputy Chief Edward Criado. The email chain dates it exactly: Benicia asked Roseville on 2024-11-20 for "the form needed to gain access to view your FLOCK cameras", Roseville sent the agreement at 13:32 on 2024-11-21, Criado completed it at 15:10, and it went back signed at 16:30 the same day. Criado signed twice, as authorised signatory and again as "Agency's LPR Manager" - the role clause 3(d) assigns the audit duty to, and the role in which he has personally run all 18 of Benicia's quarterly ALPR audits since 2021. Clause 3(d) requires that Benicia "conduct audits of Agency's searches at least every sixty (60) days"; clause 7 keeps the agreement in force until terminated. Benicia's audit series has 18 memoranda and 17 intervals, every one between 67 and 131 days, median about 92. Not one is 60 days or less. Benicia's own Policy 470.8 asks only for "at least quarterly", so the compliance programme was built to a looser standard than the agreement its Deputy Chief signed. WHAT IS AND IS NOT CLAIMED: that Benicia bound itself to a 60-day cadence and has never audited on any cadence shorter than 67 days. NOT that a breach occurred. The archive contains no reply from Roseville after the signed form was returned, so whether access was ever granted, and whether Benicia ever searched Roseville data, are unknown. If access was never granted the audit duty may be vacuous. This request asks Roseville for the side of the file Benicia does not hold: its copy of the agreement, whether and when access was granted or revoked, its Flock Network Audit records of Benicia searches, any audit Benicia supplied under clause 3(d), and the communications. Filed through the City Clerk form as PRR-2026-1076 and transferred by the City to the Police Records form as PD-2026-598 five minutes later; both carry the same 2026-08-21 filing date, so no time was lost off the ten-day clock. A parallel gap this exposed: the archive documents outbound sharing exhaustively, 88 acknowledgment letters across 82 agencies, and inbound access, where Benicia accepts another agency's terms, barely at all. Roseville and Los Altos, both solicited on 2024-11-21, are the only two instances known. | |||||||
NCRIC-2026-07-17 |
NCRIC | NCRIC's own records on Benicia ALPR data — MOU, mechanism, onward access | 2026-07-17 | 2026-07-23 | 2026-07-27 det. | partial · rolling | 4 |
| Answered in five days, inside the ten Gov. Code §7922.535 allows. Items 4 and 6 were answered with two policy documents; the other five were answered in the body of the reply. NCRIC holds no MOU or data-sharing agreement with Benicia, which corroborates finding 6 from the other side of the arrangement. It does not host Benicia's data — it has "query-based access, using standard Flock web interfaces, to ALPR data from agencies that have elected to share with NCRIC", which is not in conflict with its statement that no NCRIC system stores or makes searchable Benicia data: the data stays in Flock and NCRIC reaches into it. The load-bearing answer is item 7. Asked for records of pulls involving Benicia ALPR data, NCRIC replied that no record "exists, could be located, or could be created", because "no such report can be created which identifies if a Flock ALPR query returned matching search results from a specific Flock customer, agency, camera, or location." On 2026-06-18 Chief Menesini said the Department would need to research whether NCRIC passed Benicia's cameras to WSIN. This is the fusion centre saying that research cannot be completed from its side. Marked partial because the two policy attachments are not yet collected into the archive. | |||||||
P264292-071126 |
San Francisco PD | NCRIC/WSIN audit + list of 531–763 affected agencies | 2026-07-11 | 2026-08-21 | 2026-08-04 det. | closed · items open | 4 |
| CORRECTED 2026-08-18. This entry previously said there had been "no response of any kind on record — not a determination, not an extension, not an acknowledgement". That was wrong, and so was the complaint built on it. The Department wrote on 2026-07-21, 2026-08-05, 2026-08-11 and 2026-08-17, all to the request record in its GovQA portal. The request was submitted without an account, so no email address was attached to it, and where there is none the Department posts correspondence to the record instead — which is also why the confirmation page showed "Contact E-Mail" blank. Nobody here read the portal before alleging silence. The error was found by this archive and corrected unprompted, and the complaint to the Sunshine Ordinance Task Force (File 26108) is being corrected the same way. What the record actually shows: on 2026-07-21, the tenth day, SFPD invoked an extension under Gov. Code §7922.535(c)(1) & (2) and undertook to advise "no later than August 4, 2026". That date passed without a determination. The letters of 2026-08-05, 08-11 and 08-17 each state the Department is still searching. As of 2026-08-18 nothing has been produced and no determination has been made, fourteen days past the Department's own extended date; a further update is promised by 2026-08-19. Whether a state extension of the duty to *determine* satisfies S.F. Admin. Code §67.21(b), which requires a custodian to *comply* within ten days, is an open question for the Task Force and is not asserted here as settled. PRODUCED 2026-08-21, two days after the promised 2026-08-19 and seventeen after the Department's own extended date. Two records. The first is Item_6_-_WSIN_LPR_Memo_.pdf, a one-page image-only scan dated 2026-05-12 from Kent A. Shaw, Executive Director of the Western States Information Network, to Director Mike Sena at NCRIC, subject "Updated LPR Data Access and Sharing Policy". It states that "during April and May 2026, two WSIN Watch Center analysts conducted nine Flock License Plate Reader (LPR) inquiries that returned responsive results from San Francisco devices", that those searches "were performed on behalf of federal and out-of-state agencies" in homicide, human trafficking and child sexual abuse investigations, that results were passed to the requesting officers through an encrypted file-sharing system, and that the two analysts "were unaware that sharing California LPR data with federal and out-of-state agencies is prohibited". NINE is not 299: the request, quoted verbatim in all three SFPD letters, cited the Department's public statement of roughly 299 improper inquiries over roughly a year. Either this is a second incident postdating the audit or the memo covers a fraction; it does not acknowledge the larger figure. The second record is April_26_NET_Redacted.csv, SFPD's Flock Network Audit export for April 2026: 529,948 search records, 2026-04-01 to 2026-05-01, from 312 distinct searching agencies, every one of them Californian. Its columns match exactly the reduced schema Flock announced on 2025-12-12 — officer names and plates are "***" in every row. Item 2, the roster of the 531 to 763 agencies whose databases were queried, was NOT produced: the export gives a per-search count of networks reached and never names them, so item 3 is also unanswered. The CSV is 102 MiB and is held at data/April_26_NET_Redacted.csv, outside pdf/, so it is archived and checksummed but not yet wired into the site build. **CLOSED on or before 2026-08-22**, observed as fulfilled on the Department's GovQA portal. No closing letter reached the requester and none appears on the record after 2026-08-17, so the closure is a workflow status rather than a written determination, and no document states which items the Department considers answered. Measured against the seven items as filed that is one produced of seven: the April export answers item 4, the audit-log data, and the WSIN memorandum is at best partial to item 6, being a communication between WSIN and NCRIC rather than between SFPD and either. Items 1, 2, 3, 5 and 7 have nothing responsive at all, so the audit itself, the roster of queried agencies, the Benicia question, the NCRIC authorisation and the notifications to affected agencies are all unanswered by a request the Department now records as complete. Stated as a fact about the record, not as an allegation: the likelier explanation is the same records-management gap that left four letters unread in the portal for five weeks. | |||||||
PR-2026-180 |
City of Benicia | ALPR sharing roster + §470.9 compliance audits | 2026-07-11 | 2026-07-21 | 2026-09-11 | partial · rolling | 9 |
| This is the sharing-roster request, not the NCRIC one. The City settled which is which on 2026-07-27, when Records Supervisor Kaluza explained the duplicate letters: "these were the first item listed in this request" — and the signed acknowledgment letters are item 1 of the sharing request. 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. That is responsive rather than evasive, and re-producing them to be comprehensive is a reasonable answer; the point that survives is that the request returned no roster material the archive did not already hold, and no §470.9 compliance audit at all. Three questions put on 2026-07-26 — whether the City holds the Flock Network Audit export, whether it holds any NCRIC notification trail, and how the location withholding squares with the narrower position taken under PR-2025-200 — were confirmed added to this request and remain unanswered. Camera locations withheld under Gov. Code §7923.600(a) and the §7922.000 balancing test. Second phase delivered on the promised date, 2026-08-14: 210 files, 201 of them already held. The nine new ones are the first records this request has produced that are not acknowledgment letters — seven versions of Policy 470 spanning 2019 to 2025, and two further versions of the Flock access request template. On the face of those versions the mandatory quarterly audit section entered the policy in August 2021, is absent from the versions dated 2024-01-11 and 2024-09-10, and returns in the version dated 2025-09-10. No version between those last two was produced, so the gap is a gap in the production rather than an established fact about the policy, and nothing here shows why the section came out. Still no §470.9 compliance audit: the City has now produced the policy that requires the audits without producing any. Next update promised 2026-09-11, the same date given on PR-2026-209. | |||||||
PR-2026-189 |
City of Benicia | Leonardo/ELSAG + SignalTrace device-identifier correlation | 2026-07-18 | 2026-08-21 | 2026-09-18 | partial · rolling | 39 |
| 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). Second phase collected 2026-08-21: 39 files, 29 already held, 10 new, and the hit rate is inverted — 8 of 10 are on topic against 6 of 29 in the first phase. Two are Leonardo.Ai noise. The new material is also different in kind: the first phase was journalism about SignalTrace, this one contains Leonardo soliciting Benicia directly. Two copies of a Lexipol GrantFinder email state that "Leonardo License Plate Readers are a strong fit within JAG's eligible funding priorities" and invite the reader to "connect with the Leonardo Team for a cost estimate to include in your grant application budget". Two copies of a Police1 webinar invitation presented with Leonardo teach how Bluetooth and RF "electronic fingerprints" integrate with ALPR, with a live walkthrough. An ELSAG grant pitch lists "Identify suspects by the consumer electronic devices they use" as a benefit. None of these four contains the string "SignalTrace", so narrowing the keyword search would have lost them; the defect is that an email sweep cannot reach a contract, not that the terms are too broad. Still nothing responsive to items 1, 3 or 4. The six questions put on 2026-08-08 were not answered. Next update promised 2026-09-18. | |||||||
PR-2026-181 |
City of Benicia | Flock Network Audit log + NCRIC notification trail | 2026-07-11 | 2026-08-28 | 2026-09-25 | partial · rolling | 49 |
| This is the NCRIC request, not the sharing-roster one — its production is internal email about the June 2026 SFPD/NCRIC/WSIN disclosure, which is item 4 of the NCRIC request, and the City's 2026-07-27 letter places the sharing letters in PR-2026-180. Responded on the deadline with a §7922.535(c) extension — 'voluminous' records — then produced on 2026-08-06, a day after the 2026-08-05 date it had promised. Item 4 is the only item answered: nothing was produced for the inbound Network Audit export (item 1), the queries attributable to NCRIC, WSIN or federal agencies (item 2), any notification that Benicia's data had been improperly accessed (item 3), the audit-logging enable/disable history (item 5), or any review of external access (item 6). The 34 records are a single subject: the City's own internal traffic after San Francisco cut off NCRIC's access in June 2026. They include a resident's 2026-06-18 email to Chief Menesini asking whether Benicia shares with NCRIC, whether it has audited who has queried its network, and what state the national-lookup setting is in; and, 13 minutes earlier, Mayor Steve Young forwarding the SF Chronicle story to Capt. Criado asking the department to "confirm whether or not flock access is made available to NCRIC and WSIN". Chief Menesini answered the Mayor at 11:34 the same morning: "Yes, for NCRIC.. No to WISN" — and added that the department would "need to do some research to see if NICRIC shared our Benicia cameras with WISN who in return shared with outside federal agencies. This may take some time to dissect." The whole production spans 56 minutes of one morning and ends there. Every file is an image-only scan; all 34 are pixel-distinct, so none is a duplicate of another. Camera locations withheld again under Gov. Code §7923.600(a) and the §7922.000 balancing test. Next update promised 2026-08-28. **The City met that date**, responding on 2026-08-28 with a further rolling release of 15 records. Those records carry the 2026-06-18 chain past the point the August production stopped, and they reverse three published claims -- see the corrections page. The letter adds a ground not previously asserted on this request: portions redacted as "pre-decisional, deliberative communications among City decision-makers and staff concerning policy development", under Gov. Code §7922.000 and Times Mirror Co. v. Superior Court (1991) 53 Cal.3d 1325, 1340, alongside the attorney-client withholdings. Still nothing for items 1, 2, 3, 5 or 6. Next update 2026-09-25. | |||||||
PR-2026-209 |
City of Benicia | Pre/post-ALPR outcomes, case classification, and how the released statistics were produced | 2026-08-03 | 2026-08-14 | 2026-09-11 | partial · rolling | 31 |
| The first request here to go after the denominator rather than the outcomes: a 2015-2021 baseline for the same measures the City cites, the RMS and CAD conventions that decide what becomes a case, and the query parameters behind figures already released under PR-2026-7 and PR-2026-155. Also asks the clearance question PR-2025-271 left unanswered, and asks that anything not tracked be stated as not tracked rather than omitted. Answered 2026-08-14, one day past the ten-day deadline -- the first Benicia response in this archive to arrive late, and by a single day. The first phase reaches only Category 7, data sharing: 112 one-page letters, 82 of them already held. The 30 new ones are a rewritten acknowledgment letter signed by 25 agencies between 2026-08-04 and 2026-08-12, drafted by counsel and adding an audit obligation and a revocation right, plus five older letters stamped NO ACCESS. Of 83 agencies on the roster, 25 are on the 2026 template, five have lost access, and 53 remain on the 2025 letter -- San Francisco PD, its NCRIC letter and its Strategic Investigation Unit letter among them. Nothing responsive to Categories 1-6. Camera locations withheld again under Gov. Code 7923.600(a) and the 7922.000 balancing test. Next update promised 2026-09-11. | |||||||
PR-2026-211 |
City of Benicia | Directives on not disclosing ALPR use — in reports, to drivers, and in discovery | 2026-08-04 | 2026-08-28 | 2026-09-08 | partial · rolling | 1 |
| Filed the day 404 Media published the Wapello County, Iowa sheriff's Flock SOP — "DO NOT MENTION ALPR USAGE TO THE OCCUPANTS OF THE VEHICLE", keep it out of reports "UNLESS ABSOLUTELY NECESSARY", and if it must be written, write "using county resources" instead. Asks whether Benicia has issued or received any equivalent guidance, including from Flock, the FBI or DOJ, who are reported to advise being "as vague as permissible". The load-bearing category is 3: whether ALPR provenance reaches the District Attorney and the defense, and whether the Department can even identify after the fact which cases began with a hit. Deliberately filed as its own request rather than a supplement to PR-2026-209, whose Category 4.5 covers the adjacent question of how a hit is documented. Answered on the promised date, 2026-08-28, item by item across all five categories -- the most granular response the City has given on any request here. The answer is almost entirely negative. Nineteen of the twenty items are NO RESPONSIVE RECORDS or a pointer to the published Policy Manual; nothing was produced. So on the Department's own account there is no directive telling officers to omit or disguise ALPR provenance (Cat 1 item 3), no guidance from Flock, the FBI, DOJ, NCRIC or WSIN on how to describe ALPR use (Cat 2), and no protocol, communication with the Solano County District Attorney, or Brady analysis about ALPR in discovery (Cat 3 items 1-3). That last one is the finding: the load-bearing question was whether ALPR provenance reaches the DA and the defense, and the City states it holds no record of the subject having been addressed. Cat 4 item 2 is refused on the merits, ALPR query logs being "logged within the Flock network" and exempt under Civ. Code §1798.90.55(b), with the transparency portal offered instead. Cat 4 item 3, legal advice, is withheld entirely as attorney-client, with no redacted version and no privilege log. One item is held open: Cat 3 item 4, whether the Department can identify after the fact which cases began with an ALPR hit, drew a request for clarification, with the request closable if no answer arrives by 2026-09-08. The subject line reads FINAL; the body sets a date. **Clarification SENT 2026-09-06**, two days inside the City's date, at _submissions/correspondence/2026-09-06_PR-2026-211_clarification-SENT.md. It answers item 4 and nothing else: the item is restated as 4(a) to 4(d) against the Organization Audit Log, which Flock's notice of 2025-12-12 distinguishes from the Network Audit and says remains unchanged and fully accessible to the agency. Each sub-item names what would satisfy it, and 4(d) offers that a written statement of no such capability would fully resolve it. The letter also asks the City to confirm that PR-2026-211 remains open on item 4, the request being captioned FINAL while holding that item open. No answer yet. | |||||||
21-041 |
City of Benicia | All communications with Flock Safety, 2019 to 2021 — the contract-era record | 2021-03-16 | 2021-06-24 | — | produced | 15 |
| Filed 2021-03-16 through MuckRock, days after the Chief told this requester by email that Flock was going to Council as a sole-source purchase. Handled by Deputy City Clerk Jennifer Bergstrom, not the Police Department, and answered with thirteen rolling response letters over three and a half months before a final production on 2021-06-24. The substance is two compilations totalling 283 pages — "To Flock Safety" and "From Flock Safety" — the correspondence from the period the rest of the archive argues about but had never held: the run-up to the contract, the sole-source justification, and the first year of the program. Collected into this archive 2026-08-08; none of the fifteen files was already held. | |||||||
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 emails were obtained
Every document on this site arrived the same way: through a written request under the California Public Records Act. No leak, no source, no litigation. The process is open to anyone, and the portal is public.
Where they were filed
Eleven of the twelve requests went to the City of Benicia through its records portal at
beniciaca.justfoia.com. The twelfth went to the San
Francisco Police Department through its GovQA portal. JustFOIA is the City’s own intake system —
submitting there produces the PR-YYYY-NNN reference numbers used throughout this archive, which
is why every document here can be traced to a numbered request.
No account is needed to read the Act, and none of these requests explained who was asking or why.
What the Act actually requires
- A determination within 10 calendar days. An agency must decide within ten days whether it holds records responsive to the request and tell you (Gov. Code §7922.535). This is a determination, not delivery — a common source of confusion, and a distinction agencies rely on.
- An extension of up to 14 more days, in “unusual circumstances”, with written reasons (§7922.535(c)). Benicia invoked this on PR-2026-181, citing voluminous records.
- No identification, no stated purpose. The Act does not permit an agency to condition access on who you are or why you want it (§7921.000 et seq.).
- Records in the format held. Electronic records are generally produced electronically. These arrived as PDF printouts of email threads, with attachments embedded inside them.
- Exemptions must be claimed, and cited. An agency withholding material has to say so and identify the basis. Benicia withheld camera locations under §7923.600(a) and the §7922.000 public-interest balancing test.
What actually happened here
The statutory clock and the delivery time are very different things. Across the nine requests that produced anything, the gap between filing and production ranged from 8 days to 320 days:
| Request | Filed → produced | Days |
|---|---|---|
| PR-2025-271 | 2025-12-04 → 2025-12-12 | 8 |
| PR-2026-180 | 2026-07-11 → 2026-07-21 | 10 |
| PR-2026-189 | 2026-07-18 → 2026-07-28 | 10 |
| PR-2025-200 | 2025-09-08 → 2025-10-02 | 24 |
| PR-2026-155 | 2026-06-24 → 2026-07-21 | 27 |
| PR-2025-159 | 2025-08-16 → 2026-02-14 | 182 |
| PR-2026-7 | 2026-01-07 → 2026-07-25 | 199 |
| PR-2025-199 | 2025-09-08 → 2026-07-25 | 320 |
Several of these remain partial: the City produces in rolling batches and continues to add to requests it has already answered. PR-2026-7 was re-released on 2026-07-25 with 31 documents that had not appeared in the 2026-07-11 production two weeks earlier. A request marked “produced” is not necessarily finished.
Stated fairly: long turnarounds are not by themselves evidence of obstruction. Some of these requests were broad, and the City did keep producing. The Act’s ten-day clock governs the determination, not the delivery, and Benicia generally met it.
The friction worth recording
Benicia does not accept requests submitted through MuckRock. Deadline tracking on this site is therefore maintained by hand rather than by a filing service. The Act does not let an agency dictate the channel a request arrives through, and an agency that rejects otherwise valid requests solely because of the service that transmitted them is on questionable ground.
One request was closed for ambiguity, then reopened. PR-2026-155 was closed on the basis that it was unclear, and reopened on 2026-07-22 after a challenge under §7922.600 — the provision requiring an agency to assist a requester in making a focused, effective request.
One was denied outright. PR-2025-254, for raw ALPR data, was refused. The denial letter is itself part of the record.
One production answered a different question than the one asked. PR-2026-189 returned 29 email printouts matched on the bare token “Leonardo” — 17 of them Leonardo.Ai marketing, Leonardo da Vinci, Leonardo DiCaprio or Leonardo S.p.A. The City also produced its own tasking emails, which state the search terms and show the search was run unscoped across all City mail.
Checking the chain yourself
Provenance only means something if it can be tested. The original request-response .zip files as
downloaded from the portal are kept unmodified, and ARCHIVE-CHECKSUMS.txt lists the SHA-256 of
every file in the archive. Nothing here is edited to fix a typo or remove a name — redactions are
applied at publish time, so the published text and the source can always be compared. See
Do this for your city for the full method.
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.