Four Bay Area municipalities and Santa Clara County have canceled or frozen contracts with Flock Safety since federal agencies were caught making improper queries of its license-plate network — but San Francisco, its surveillance feeds funneled through a command center underwritten by crypto billionaire Chris Larsen, is heading in the opposite direction.

A street-level audit of San Francisco's surveillance infrastructure published by independent writer Larry Kubin of The Fogline, and reported Monday by KQED, mapped the city's sprawling camera apparatus for the first time — and found a system Kubin says has grown into something "greater than the sum of its parts." The tour turned up around 400 Flock Safety automated license-plate readers, roughly 700 SFPD drone flights in February alone, and a newly operational Real Time Investigation Center at SFPD headquarters that synthesizes those feeds in real time. A $9.4 million gift from Ripple CEO Chris Larsen helped build it.

Larry Kubin didn't set out to document a surveillance state. He set out for a walk.

Kubin, an independent writer who runs The Fogline newsletter with his wife, toured San Francisco's streets after Flock Safety's license-plate camera network became a flashpoint for civil liberties concern. He expected to find some cameras. What he found — documented in The Fogline and reported Monday by KQED's Samantha Kennedy — was something more systematic: approximately 400 automated license-plate readers mounted across the city, around 700 SFPD drone flights logged in a single month, and public safety cameras turning up in neighborhood postcards, at parks, and on the same blocks as tourist landmarks like the Painted Ladies.

"I wanted to look more into that because my initial reaction was, like, 'Oh, reading a license plate, that's not so bad,'" Kubin told KQED. The walking tour changed his view. "We shouldn't have to need this much technology," he said. "We shouldn't need a police surveillance technology inventory that's continuing to expand."

The expansion Kubin documented is happening at a moment when other Bay Area cities are doing the opposite. Santa Cruz, Mountain View, El Cerrito, and the town of Los Altos Hills have all canceled Flock contracts following revelations of improper data-sharing with out-of-state and federal agencies. Santa Clara County has cut ties with the company entirely. Berkeley's city council last month extended its Flock contract but declined to expand it.

San Francisco has not followed suit. SFPD Chief Derrick Lew disclosed last week that the Northern California Regional Intelligence Center — a federally funded intelligence hub — had "improperly" queried the city's Flock system hundreds of times, along with the Western States Information Network. The Dissent reported on June 19 that DEA, IRS, and Marshals Service personnel were among those accessing the data. SFPD has since cut off data sharing with both agencies.

But no contract has been canceled. And the infrastructure is growing more interconnected, not less.

At the center of that integration is the Real Time Investigation Center at SFPD headquarters, which the department opened last year. The center serves as an operational hub, synthesizing live feeds from Flock cameras, drones, and public safety cameras into a single interface. According to ABC7, it has contributed to over 800 arrests since opening. Mayor Daniel Lurie has touted it as a cornerstone of his public safety agenda.

What has received less attention is who helped pay for it. In addition to Proposition E — a 2024 ballot measure that gave SFPD a full year to deploy new surveillance technology without an official policy — the center received substantial private funding. Ripple CEO Chris Larsen, a major San Francisco political donor, gifted $9.4 million through Ripple and his nonprofit San Francisco Police Community Foundation to the new center, according to KQED.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation, the San Francisco-based digital rights organization, has been a consistent critic of these kinds of operations. In a statement, EFF described real-time investigation centers like SFPD's as "basically control rooms that pull together all feeds from a vast warrantless digital dragnet."

Kubin, whose walking tour became the basis for the KQED story, told the outlet he's worried about where the trend lines are pointing. "I'm just picturing where we are now and whether it can become like a sci-fi TV show," he said. With Proposition E's looser oversight framework in effect, he said, "the checks and balances are a bit looser."

A 2025 investigation by The San Francisco Standard found that out-of-state agencies had queried SFPD's Flock system 1.6 million times — a potential violation of California state law. The current chief's disclosures about NCRIC suggest the practice continued well past that investigation.

San Francisco's surveillance infrastructure, Kubin concluded after his walk, is not a collection of unconnected tools. It is a system. "It's just where trends are heading," he said, "and thinking about where to draw the line on what makes people safe versus where it starts to get a little invasive."