San Jose latest city to face questions whether federal authorities are accessing police license plate camera data

San Jose police allowed other California police agencies as recently as last June to search data from its vast network of automatic license plate reading cameras on apparent behalf of federal authorities in what critics charge were likely violations of state law intended to protect residents and immigrants from unreasonable government tracking.

San Jose is the latest city whose use of the cameras to snag criminal suspects, critics say, also threatens privacy and potentially runs afoul of state laws barring access of camera data by out-of-state and federal agencies including immigration enforcement. The San Jose Police Department denies wrongdoing. Last November, the City of Oakland, with 290 license-plate cameras, was accused in a lawsuit of ignoring an earlier legal settlement by continuing to allow federal and out-of-state agencies to access the data. Oakland declined to comment on the lawsuit.

In Santa Cruz, an admission in November by the city’s police chief that his department had allowed camera data to be accessed by out-of-state agencies led the City Council to vote Tuesday to stop using the cameras. And in Berkeley, police tightened access to the data after it was found to have been accessed by federal authorities, and the police department scheduled a community meeting for Thursday.

Critics worry the technology, already exploited by federal immigration authorities under President Donald Trump, could be used more broadly to go after the administration’s perceived enemies.

“There’s a lot of us now that are potentially part of a targeted population, and so these records of our movements are concerning,” said Tracy Rosenberg, executive director at Media Alliance, a San Francisco social justice non-profit. “It gives them a complete map of a person’s movements. This network has been built up, it can be used this way, and it might be.”

Like many cities, San Jose installed a network of automated license plate recognition or ALPR cameras throughout the city — nearly 500 as of mid-December — that capture photos of license plates and vehicles. The photos are processed by artificial intelligence into data including time and location, plate number, car color and particularities like roof racks and bumper stickers. The data allow law enforcement to track vehicles and their drivers, and receive real-time alerts when a sought vehicle is caught on camera.

Research conducted for this news organization by a security analyst shows that in 20 cases, San Jose police, via requests from other California police agencies ranging from the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Office to the Newport Beach Police Department, allowed access by federal agencies: the Federal Bureau of Investigation; the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms; the Drug Enforcement Administration, and the U.S. Postal Inspection Service. Privacy advocates describe such access as “side-door” searches, when federal or out-of-state authorities ask a California department to perform the search on their behalf.

In one case, a San Jose police officer appears to have searched San Jose’s database directly on behalf of the Fresno district office of the DEA, identified in the search as “fresno dea intel.”

In other cases, San Jose police also allowed more than a dozen searches of its camera data by officers at other California departments who appear to have been fulfilling requests from federal immigration agencies. Federal agency initials appeared in data requests to San Jose police under the reason-for-search category, and included “CBP,” a typical reference to U.S. Customs and Border Protection; “ICE,” a typical reference to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement; and “HSI,” a typical reference to ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations unit.

“We have no evidence that any federal agency has accessed our databases for immigration-related enforcement,” San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan said Wednesday. “What we do have evidence of is how vital these cameras have been when it comes to apprehended criminals who have harmed our city and harmed our residents. In just the last three months, our system helped us find and arrest at least 60 suspects, including the person who opened fire at Valley Fair on Black Friday.”

The searches of San Jose’s database covered June 2024 to October 2025. Other than the search for “fresno dea intel” in July 2025, the most-recent access by federal agencies took place in June 2025.

The growing furor over license plate cameras focuses on two California laws. Senate Bill 34, passed in 2015, bans agencies from allowing agencies outside the state access to the data. California Attorney General Rob Bonta’s official guidance emphasizes that the law prohibits access by “out-of-state or federal law enforcement agencies.” Senate Bill 54, passed in 2017, bans California police agencies from sharing non-public personal information for purposes of immigration enforcement.

The San Jose Police Department, responding to a list detailing the searches, did not dispute the data access, but said that under departmental policy, the license plate camera system can “support local, state, and federal safety departments in the identification of vehicles associated with targets of criminal investigations, including investigations of serial crimes.”

The policy “reflects the operational reality that serious and violent crime investigations often involve multi-jurisdictional coordination,” the department said, adding that federal agencies “do not have direct access” to the camera data.

Under SB 34, no license plate data can be accessed by federal agencies “for any reason,” said Brian Hofer, former chair of the City of Oakland Privacy Advisory Commission, who sued Oakland as a co-plaintiff with the Oakland civil rights nonprofit Secure Justice he leads. “The data-sharing prohibition of SB 34 is not limited to ‘direct access.’”

San Jose police acknowledged its personnel had “on occasion” conducted license plate camera data searches “as part of collaborative investigations with Federal partners into criminal conduct,” and asserted those searches were “consistent with departmental policy and California law.” The searches “were not related to immigration enforcement,” the department said.

Rosenberg said the fact that Homeland Security Investigations and the Border Patrol are “heavily involved in immigration enforcement” and many other federal agencies have been “re-purposed” under Trump to do that work makes the San Jose department’s assertion that the searches weren’t done for immigration enforcement questionable.

She said that in her view, “They are in absolute violation of SB 34, and they’re in arguable violation of SB 54.”

The San Jose department called its camera network “one of many tools we responsibly and lawfully use” to promote public safety.

A March 2025 paper in the Justice Evaluation Journal by the chief of the Atlantic City Police Department and a professor at New Jersey’s Rowan University found that limited studies to date provide “little evidence that (the cameras) reduce crime.”

Critics argue that reported incidents of data access by federal authorities are just the tip of the iceberg, as California police often use generic terms like “investigation” when noting reasons for a search. Public outcry over allegations of illegal data access has made it less likely police will include reasons such as “CBP” or “HSI,” critics say, and many police departments redact the reasons for searches from their publicly available camera-data reports.

Californians, Rosenberg said, “should be concerned.”