The tide appeared to turn in 2022, when Supervisor Aaron Peskin sponsored a bill authored by Mayor London Breed that allowed law enforcement to use non-city owned camera footage to stop crime.
Peskin had been the sponsor of the 2019 bill that banned facial recognition. “As the author of the legislation that created reasonable regulations for oversight of the City’s use of surveillance technology, the policy as amended endeavors to balance the public’s civil liberties and right to privacy with practical logistics of enforcing the public’s safety,” he said at the time.
In March, San Francisco voters passed Proposition E, which allows the police department to use technology like drones and facial recognition for a year without getting approval from the board of supervisors.
“I think there were a number of board members who either were running to retain their seats or who were planning to run for other offices that had to make a choice of whether they stood against what their constituents were wanting,” said Jenkins.
The Flock Safety cameras have already been used to solve crimes, and Jenkins said her department is prosecuting a case where the license plate data could become evidence.
Flock’s founder, Garrett Langley, started the company after his neighborhood in an Atlanta suburb fell victim to a string of organized burglaries. Despite a lot of Ring doorbell footage, a police major told him he couldn’t do much with it and instead needed license plate data.
Langley called two friends at Georgia Tech and asked them to help him build a license plate reader, which he then installed in his neighborhood. A couple of months later, another break-in happened. Langley’s reader singled out a license plate that hadn’t been seen in the neighborhood before. Less than 12 hours later, the driver was arrested.
The device became the basis for Flock, founded in 2017 and now valued at $4 billion by investors like Founders Fund, Andreessen Horowitz, and Kleiner Perkins.
The cellular-connected, solar-powered cameras constantly capture license plates and can flag police when they see a stolen car, or a car with a mismatched plate. When crimes occur, such as a kidnapping, the cameras can help police quickly apprehend the perpetrators.
Flock cameras create a “vehicle fingerprint” for a car. So even if a criminal removes or switches a license plate on a car, the cameras can still locate it in real time to solve or stop a crime.
But the key to winning the business of San Francisco and other privacy-conscious cities was Flock’s customizable software that allows cities to adjust data retention policies and other privacy settings.
For instance, some cities might want to keep a database of license plates and locations indefinitely, which might help solve cold cases or aid in current investigations. Others, like San Francisco, opt for very short data retention time periods to protect against any possible abuse of the information.
“We let the city decide what is societally enforced,” said Langley in an interview with Semafor. “We’ll build that technology and then hand it over to the city.”
