The Partnership for the Advancement of New Americans, represented by the ACLU Foundation of San Diego & Imperial Counties, filed a sweeping lawsuit against the City of San Diego, Police Chief Scott Wahl and Mayor Todd Gloria in San Diego Superior Court on September 29. The complaint alleges that SDPD's automated license plate reader program has effectively transformed hundreds of ordinary San Diego streets into a citywide surveillance network capable of reconstructing where residents travel, whom they visit and potentially some of the most intimate details of their lives.
The lawsuit marks a dramatic escalation of a privacy fight SanDiegoVille has been following for months. What began as a debate over whether license plate cameras are an effective crime-fighting tool has evolved into a much larger confrontation over whether police should be permitted to indiscriminately collect the movements of millions of people who are suspected of absolutely nothing.
At the center of the case is a deceptively simple piece of technology. Automated license plate readers, commonly called ALPRs, photograph passing vehicles and extract information including a license plate number, precise location, date and time, storing those observations in a database that investigators can later search. Depending on the image and system, cameras can also capture the vehicle itself, its make, model and color, visible occupants and distinguishing characteristics such as roof racks, decals and bumper stickers.
Unlike traditional surveillance, however, investigators do not necessarily identify a suspect and then begin watching that person. San Diego's system collects first and investigates later, meaning the car of someone suspected of murder and the car of a parent driving a child to school can be recorded in precisely the same database. That distinction is at the heart of the lawsuit.
SDPD operates at least 500 ALPR cameras throughout San Diego, according to the complaint, while also having access to more than 200 readers in local private networks operated by businesses, shopping centers, homeowners associations and others. The lawsuit alleges San Diego has more ALPRs than any other California city and ranks fifth among 2,386 U.S. cities measured for camera density.
The sheer volume of information being captured is staggering. According to figures cited in the lawsuit from San Diego's Flock transparency portal, SDPD's system detected 3,896,699 vehicles in just one month, from August 18 through September 17, 2026, collecting location information as the vehicles traveled throughout the city.
Only 15,483 of those nearly 3.9 million scans - approximately 0.4% - produced a match to a plate of interest, according to the complaint. The ACLU and PANA argue that means the overwhelming majority of information being swept into the system concerns motorists who were not identified by the system as being connected to any investigation or hot-list alert.
The database is not merely being used occasionally. SDPD conducted more than 244,000 retrospective ALPR searches in 2025 - roughly 668 every day - according to the department's surveillance report cited in the complaint. Between January and August 2026, officers performed another 114,692 searches, with 3,962 listing the reason simply as "other."
Those searches are significant because San Diego retains its ALPR information for 30 days. A police investigator can therefore potentially search backward through weeks of stored observations rather than merely receiving a real-time alert when a wanted or stolen vehicle passes a camera.
The lawsuit argues that the result can amount to a digital map of a person's life. Repeated observations can potentially reveal where someone sleeps, works, takes children to school, worships, receives medical care, visits friends or romantic partners, attends political demonstrations or travels for other sensitive purposes.
The complaint points to the physical placement of some cameras to make that concern less theoretical. It alleges four ALPR cameras are positioned around an intersection outside a Muslim civil rights organization, five around roads outside a nonprofit serving system-affected and unhoused youth, and four at a major intersection outside a reproductive health clinic.
"San Diego's ALPR system is an invasive, around-the-clock mass surveillance technology that can reveal intimate details of a person's life," ACLU Foundation of San Diego & Imperial Counties attorney Samantha Itazawa said in announcing the lawsuit. The organization argues that collecting movements on this scale violates privacy protections contained in the California Constitution.
PANA, a San Diego nonprofit that advocates for refugees and newcomer communities, is the plaintiff. The defendants are the City of San Diego, Wahl in his official capacity as police chief and Gloria in his official capacity as mayor.
The case, Partnership for the Advancement of New Americans v. City of San Diego, et al., San Diego Superior Court Case No. 26CU051879C, seeks considerably more than changes to department policy. PANA wants a judge to declare the program unconstitutional, stop San Diego from using and contracting for ALPR technology, require the removal of ALPR hardware and streetlight cameras implicated by its requested relief, and order the deletion of information already collected.
The lawsuit also attacks the program through the city's checkbook. It alleges San Diego spends taxpayer money, employee time and other public resources operating the network, with annual service costs for the two integrated technologies totaling more than $2 million. PANA brings a taxpayer claim contending that spending public money on what it alleges is an unconstitutional system amounts to an illegal expenditure of public funds.
The allegations have not been adjudicated, and filing a lawsuit does not establish that San Diego's surveillance program violates the California Constitution. San Diego police and the City Attorney's Office have declined to comment on the pending litigation.
There is also a substantial public-safety argument on the other side of the controversy. Police have defended ALPR technology as a powerful investigative tool for locating stolen cars, wanted suspects and missing or endangered people, and SDPD has credited its system with more than 400 arrests and approximately $6 million in recovered stolen property.
That effectiveness is precisely what makes the fight over the technology so consequential. A system capable of finding a kidnapping suspect because cameras remember where a vehicle traveled is powerful for the same reason privacy advocates fear it: the system can remember where vehicles traveled.
The lawsuit arrives after months of increasingly intense opposition to Flock Safety around the country. Communities nationwide have terminated, rejected or reconsidered Flock contracts, while criticism has increasingly crossed traditional political lines, with civil-liberties organizations focusing on immigration, reproductive health and protest activity and other critics raising concerns about warrantless government surveillance.
SanDiegoVille examined that backlash in August after a protester dressed as Darth Vader appeared before a City Council committee and sarcastically praised Flock as a useful tool for an authoritarian empire. Behind the stunt was a serious controversy involving documented allegations around the country that police officers had misused license plate reader systems to track romantic partners and other people for personal reasons.
The new complaint itself cites several such cases. It points to allegations involving officers elsewhere who used ALPR systems to monitor romantic interests and recounts a San Jose case in which an officer was fired after accessing ALPR information while off duty to locate a woman who had accused his cousin of domestic violence.
Flock has responded to the national controversy with significant changes to its platform. In August, the company announced that it was changing its recommended and default ALPR retention period from 30 days to seven days while introducing stronger search-accountability measures, tools intended to detect abnormal usage and additional security protections.
San Diego, however, continues retaining ALPR information for 30 days, according to the lawsuit. The complaint specifically contrasts SDPD's policy with Flock's newly shortened default and recommendation.
The San Diego lawsuit also lands amid controversy over the increasingly sophisticated software that can sit on top of the cameras. The complaint notes that SDPD signed a contract in December 2025 to pilot what was then called Flock Nova and is now identified in the complaint as FlockOS, a data-integration platform capable of retrieving information including public records, jail records and computer-aided dispatch notes.
SanDiegoVille previously reported that the Nova arrangement was not initially disclosed to the City Council, Privacy Advisory Board or public. SDPD maintained that the platform had not been activated and that it did not intend to use it, while critics argued the episode exposed a fundamental problem with regulating surveillance technology that can become dramatically more powerful through software without installing a single additional camera.
That concern increasingly defines the national Flock debate. A license plate by itself identifies a vehicle; connected databases can potentially associate that vehicle with an owner, repeated camera observations can establish movement patterns, and increasingly sophisticated software can analyze relationships and patterns at a speed and scale that traditional physical surveillance could never replicate.
San Diego's own history makes the dispute particularly resonant. The city's original smart-streetlight system generated a major privacy controversy after technology promoted for broader municipal purposes became useful to law enforcement, eventually helping spur creation of the city's TRUST surveillance ordinance and Privacy Advisory Board.
The latest lawsuit now asks a court to address a question City Hall has repeatedly debated but never resolved to critics' satisfaction: whether collecting the location of virtually every vehicle that happens to pass hundreds of cameras is constitutionally different from investigating particular people suspected of crimes.
For police, the cameras can turn a fleeting glimpse of a wanted vehicle into an investigative lead within seconds. For the ACLU and PANA, that same capability has created something much larger — a searchable archive of ordinary San Diegans' movements assembled before police have any reason to suspect them of anything.
The California Constitution expressly includes privacy among the state's inalienable rights, and the lawsuit argues that California provides broader privacy protection than the federal Constitution. Whether San Diego's particular ALPR system crosses that constitutional line is now a question for the courts, not a proposition established merely because the lawsuit alleges it.
But the practical stakes of the litigation are unusually concrete. PANA is not asking San Diego to install better warning signs, shorten its retention period or impose another layer of auditing. It is asking a Superior Court judge to order the city to turn the system off, remove the cameras and erase the data.
After years of San Diego debating how its surveillance network should be regulated, the new lawsuit poses a far more fundamental question: whether the city should be operating it at all.
Originally published on September 30, 2026.
