Redwood City will not award a new license plate reader contract until 2027, a delay that effectively ends its current arrangement with Flock Safety when the fixed-camera agreement expires in November.
City Manager Patrick Heisinger announced the shift at a community forum this week. A vendor recommendation was meant to reach the council this autumn, a deadline that slid as the program came under closer examination.
An audit counted 99 unauthorized searches
A review covering more than 10 million records back to April 2023 identified 99 queries that should not have happened. Most of them traced back to Flock miscategorizing agencies, which handed outside departments a level of access the city had not intended to grant.
Chief Dan Mulholland maintains nothing shows the outside agencies listed in the audit ever obtained any imagery. A separate review found several out-of-state and federal agencies had searched the system, according to NBC Bay Area.
The controls tightened after the fact
In February 2026 the city withdrew from Flock’s statewide lookup tool and cut its sharing arrangement back to nearby law-enforcement agenciesne Bay Area counties. Those changes came after the access problems, not before them, which is the pattern that has driven cancellations in Alexandria, Lockport and Cornell.
For vendors selling sensor networks into local government, the lesson is that a permissions misconfiguration is a procurement event. The cameras worked. The access model did not, and the contract is now expiring without a replacement.
