I wore a badge for 35 years in law enforcement, retired as a commander with the San Diego County Sheriff’s Office, where I designed and led Operation Stonegarden, a border partnership that grew from six agencies to 17. I was an early supporter of automated license plate readers, and I still believe that technology used with discipline and honesty can help solve serious crimes. What I didn’t expect was how quickly that discipline would erode, or how little the public would be told.
On Oct. 21, a San Diego City Council committee voted unanimously to begin ending the city’s use of Flock Safety cameras, though Mayor Todd Gloria, who credits them with helping in nearly 900 investigations and recovering $8.7 million in stolen property, may veto the effort. Those results deserve a fair hearing. But the debate at City Hall has largely overlooked the rest of the county.
I live in La Mesa and drive past, walk past and ride my bike past our city’s cameras most days. Times of San Diego reported last week that those 20 cameras were searched more than 3.13 million times in seven months, more than 14,000 searches a day. La Mesa’s own officers ran about six a day. Nearly all the rest came from a statewide network of 306 agencies that the city chose to join, and the largest local user was my former department, which searched La Mesa’s cameras 57,879 times.
I wanted to know why, so I filed a public records request for the audit logs. La Mesa produced them with the reason for every single search blacked out. The city has told Times of San Diego that it “does not control” how often other agencies search its network. Residents should hear that for what it is: no one in our city is watching who looks at our movements, or why.
It also helps to understand what these cameras have become. Today’s systems identify a vehicle by its make, model and color, and by details like a roof rack or a bumper sticker, even when the plate can’t be read. They work like facial recognition for cars. Because most of us drive the same car to the same places, a car’s history quickly becomes a person’s history: where you sleep, where you worship, which doctor you see, whether you visited an immigration attorney or attended a rally. Run enough searches and you can map an entire community.
After a career in this profession, I can tell you that misuse of a tool this powerful isn’t a remote possibility. It is predictable, because it has already happened. Officers elsewhere have used these systems to track former partners. A Texas sheriff’s office searched cameras in other states for a woman who had self-managed an abortion. Federal agents have run immigration searches through a local officer’s login. Here in San Diego, two men who were wrongly arrested after plate-reader hits are now suing the city.
In June 2025, CalMatters and inewsource reported that the Sheriff’s Office had run searches on behalf of Customs and Border Protection or the Border Patrol, even though state law prohibits sharing this data with federal agencies. The department promised an internal review whose findings the public has never seen, and it has kept expanding into contract cities with the same assurance that nothing is shared with immigration authorities. Even the San Diego Police Department logged nearly 4,000 searches simply as “other” before ending that option. A reason that can’t be checked only looks like accountability.
That is why this can’t be solved one city at a time. If San Diego turns off its cameras, a San Diegan driving to Grossmont Center is still captured in La Mesa and searchable across the state. A resident of Encinitas or Poway, where the Sheriff’s Office runs the cameras, gains nothing from another city’s policy. We are all only as protected as the weakest policy in the county.
We need one countywide standard. Every search should be tied to a real case or report number, with no catch-alls like “other” or “investigation.” Access should be limited to named partners under written agreements requiring compliance with state law, rather than sprawling statewide networks. Audits showing who searched, when and why should be published regularly, with search reasons public by default. And every city that contracts with the Sheriff’s Office should follow the same rules, set by the Board of Supervisors.
None of this is a ban. Any agency that follows the law should already be able to meet these standards, and any agency that can’t should pause until it can.
I ask the Board of Supervisors to direct the Sheriff’s Office to release its 2025 review and adopt a countywide standard. I ask my own La Mesa City Council to leave the statewide network and release the search reasons. And I ask every police chief who says this data never reaches immigration enforcement to prove it with records anyone can read.
David A. Myers is a retired commander in the San Diego County Sheriff’s Office with 35 years of service. He served as director of safety and security at Jewish Family Service of San Diego from 2023 to 2025.
