San Francisco police discovered that federal and out-of-state agencies ran at least 299 illegal queries against the city's Flock license-plate camera network over the past year — a breach that began inside a federally funded data-sharing hub and raises unresolved questions about whether the data ultimately reached immigration enforcement.

Police Chief Derrick Lew disclosed the finding Wednesday at the city's police commission, calling it a serious concern even as he defended the Flock program that enabled it. The breach is the second known failure of San Francisco's Flock surveillance data to stay within legal boundaries — and the first caught by an internal audit. California law flatly prohibits sharing automated license-plate reader data with out-of-state or federal entities. Nobody in the access chain, it turns out, appears to have known that.

Police Chief Derrick Lew stood before the San Francisco Police Commission on Wednesday evening and confirmed what privacy advocates had warned about since the city first installed Flock Safety cameras in 2024: the surveillance data was flowing places it wasn't supposed to go.

An internal audit found 299 "illegal inquiries" into San Francisco's Flock network over the course of a year, carried out by federal and out-of-state agencies in violation of California law. A list shared with reporters at the meeting identified the querying agencies as including the Drug Enforcement Agency, the Internal Revenue Service, the U.S. Marshals Service, the Idaho and Oregon state police, and the U.S. Forest Service. The queries covered investigations ranging from homicide and kidnapping to theft, prostitution, and poaching.

"As helpful as the Flock cameras have been for the department, they have also caused immediate concern," Lew told commissioners, according to Mission Local, which first reported the audit findings. "It's no secret ALPR is a controversial tool, and I think there are a lot of privacy concerns."

The Pathway: A Fusion Center, a Regional Network, No Guardrails

The breach didn't begin with a federal agent logging directly into San Francisco's systems. It started at the Northern California Regional Intelligence Center — one of 80 federally-supported data clearinghouses designed to break down silos between law enforcement agencies at every level of government.

NCRIC granted access to the Western States Information Network, a Sacramento-based, federally funded organization that provides intelligence services to western states and Pacific island jurisdictions. That group ran the illegal queries against SFPD's Flock data — and, according to the department, the analysts were "purportedly unaware" that California law prohibited exactly what they were doing. They have since updated their policies.

Fusion centers like NCRIC operate with limited public oversight. Their explicit purpose — facilitating information exchange across agency lines — is also what makes them dangerous when that exchange crosses legal or jurisdictional boundaries. It is still unclear what guardrails, if any, were in place to prevent the Western States Information Network from accessing California-restricted data in the first place.

Lew said he "immediately turned off" NCRIC's access to the Flock system after learning of the breach. The incident is now under investigation by the city's Human Rights Commission and the Department of Police Accountability.

The ICE Caveat

Lew was careful to state that immigration enforcement agencies — specifically ICE and the Department of Homeland Security — did not directly access San Francisco's license-plate data. SFPD echoed this in a written statement.

The reassurance has a significant gap. The IRS, which did query the database, agreed in 2025 to share data with ICE. That arrangement resulted in the tax agency transmitting addresses for approximately 47,000 people to immigration agents, according to a government watchdog review. Whether Flock query results moved along that same pipeline is, at this point, unknown.

The Second Breach

This is not the first time San Francisco's Flock data escaped its intended boundaries. Between 2024 and 2025, SFPD permitted out-of-state agencies to access its Flock network 1.6 million times, the San Francisco Standard previously reported — a figure that dwarfs the 299 illegal queries now under investigation. California's prohibition on sharing ALPR data with out-of-state entities exists precisely because other jurisdictions routinely funnel such records to ICE, and the state has moved to cut off that pipeline.

San Francisco says it is apparently the first agency in California to identify this particular pattern of unauthorized access — suggesting other departments feeding into the same fusion center infrastructure may face similar exposure without yet knowing it.

SFPD, for its part, did not back away from the Flock program. "This network allows officers to identify suspects more efficiently and with more precision than ever before," the department said in a statement. Lew called it "a big tool in our tool vault in terms of our ongoing crime-fighting efforts."

The Dissent has covered SFPD's Flock Safety contract and its privacy implications since April. The audit disclosed Wednesday is the first documented instance of unauthorized federal access to the network.