Santa Clara Police Department ALPR usage

November 22, 2025

Table of contents

This report is based on data obtained via California Public Record Act request 25-886, for data related to the ALPR system operated by the Santa Clara Police Department (hereafter SCPD). It covers the period March 1, 2024 through July 31, 2025.

The SCPD decided to redact the case number and reason from the Organization and Network audits. Consequently, there is not enough data to reconstruct cases (even approximately), and each query is treated as a separate case.

The Transparency portal.

1:1 Sharing audit

Under 1:1 Sharing, each agency decides which other agencies can access its data. Agency A can share with agency B without B sharing with A.

SCPD and X allow reciprocal searches: 279 agencies.

SCPD allows searches, but X does not: 66 agencies, including:

• Decommissioned Org (still in the transparency portal as of November 22, 2025)
• Duplicate - do not use -Port of Los Angeles CA PD (still in the transparency portal as of November 22, 2025)
• Las Vegas Metro NV PD (see below)
• Western States Information Network (CA) (see below).

Most likely, the Decommissioned Org was not born that way, and its name was changed along the way. That of course comprimises the integrety of the logs, and is tampering (intentional or not; consequential or not).

SCPD does not allow searches but X does: 32 agencies, both inside and outside California.

Sharing outside California

The SCPD has shared data with the non California agencies:

Here is the sharing by month for the Las Vegas Metro PD. While this agency is in the sharing audit, and has made queries throughout the period covered by the data, it is no longer listed on the transparency portal (as of November 22, 2025).

Here is the sharing by month for the US Postal Inspection Service:

MOCIC is apparently the Mid-States Organized Crime Information Center®, that serves Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Wisconsin, as well as parts of Canada. It is part of the Regional Information Sharing Systems (RISS) program. The RISS website states: Neither the U.S. Department of Justice nor any of its components operate, control, are responsible for, or necessarily endorse, this website (including, without limitation, its content, technical infrastructure, and policies, and any services or tools provided). Together with the ® and the .net domain, that suggests that this is a private entity. Western States Information Network (WSIN) is another division of RISS.

All those queries are clear violations of California SB 40, as California state and local law enforcement agencies have been reminded by the California Attorney General in 2023.

Sharing via Statewide lookup

13 agencies without 1:1 Sharing have accessed the SCPD data. Given this small number, it is possible that those agencies had 1:1 sharing at some point in the past, and that it was revoked.

Organization audit: number of queries

Most of the 63,193 queries made by SCPD involve, among others, cameras controlled by the SCPD. 3,141 queries involve only non-SCPD cameras.

That amounts to one query every twelve minutes.

It is also interesting to note that Las Vegas has made more queries on the SCPD data than SCPD itself.

Organization audit: number of agencies and cameras

The first column is the number of agencies that queried the data, which by construction must be 1 in an organization audit.

The second column is the maximum number of cameras involved in a query. While most agencies operate a relatively small number of cameras, they can search data captured by other agencies.

The next column, “% 0-100” is the percentage of queries that involved less than 100 cameras. Similarly, the following columns are the percentages for 100 to 1k cameras, 1k to 10k cameras and more than 10k cameras respectively.

There is clearly a bi-modal distribution, as well as a tendancy to a larger proportion of broad searches.

Organization audit: personnel

The SCPD elected to redact the user names from the both the Organization and Network audits.

Network audit: number of queries

This amounts to one query every 6 seconds.

Network audit: number of agencies and cameras

See this previous section for the meaning of the columns.

As we have seen in the previous section, the queries by other agencies dominate. From the point of view of those agencies, SCPD is just one of many agencies, more or less geographically distant. When SCPD’s data is searched, there are probably many other agencies searched as well, and therefore many cameras involved, hence the high proportion of broad searches.

Top agencies accessing SCPD data

The 25 agencies with the largest number of cases involving SCPD data: