California | The Navarro Report | September 3, 2026
California lawmakers closed out this year’s legislative session the same way they have closed out four previous sessions since 2022: without passing a single law to regulate automated license plate readers, even as documented abuses of the technology continue to mount and a national backlash against it accelerates.
Senate Bill 1013, authored by Senator Sabrina Cervantes, a Riverside Democrat, would have tightened privacy protections around how license plate data is collected, shared and retained, and would have guarded against misuse by law enforcement officers. It cleared the state Senate with momentum behind it, only to be halted in the Assembly by Majority Leader Cecilia Aguilar-Curry on the Legislature’s final day, before it could even reach a floor vote. It joined a small cluster of bills that appeared to have solid support but died under circumstances lawmakers and advocates have struggled to fully explain.
The failure lands at a moment of unusual, cross-partisan discomfort with the technology. “It’s a really disappointing outcome at a time when there is bipartisan concern about this mass surveillance tool,” said Catherine Crump, co-director of UC Berkeley’s Center for Law & Technology, who testified in support of the bill in July. Her framing points to a rare consensus: concern about license plate readers now spans the political spectrum, yet the Legislature has been unable, five years running, to convert that concern into statute.
Law enforcement groups fought the bill just as hard as advocates pushed for it. Cory Salzillo, legislative director for the California State Sheriffs’ Association, said his organization was “glad” the measure did not pass, arguing it would have limited the utility of license plate data for solving crimes, locating missing people, and even exonerating innocent individuals. Nearly 40 law enforcement agencies and police unions opposed the bill, according to reporting cited by CalMatters — a formidable coalition that has helped sink every prior attempt at reform since 2022, including a version Governor Gavin Newsom vetoed last year over its requirement that police delete license plate data after 60 days.
The technology itself is now in wide use across the state. More than 230 California police or sheriff’s departments currently deploy automated license plate readers, according to Cervantes, cameras that log passing vehicles’ plates and feed the data into networks shared locally and, in many cases, nationally. That reach is precisely what worries privacy advocates: the same system built to locate a stolen vehicle or a missing person can just as easily be repurposed to track the movements of law-abiding residents who have never been suspected of any crime.
The record of documented misuse is not hypothetical. Lawmakers point to instances in which officers used license plate reader data to stalk or harass private citizens across Los Angeles, Marin, Orange, Riverside, Sacramento, San Diego and Shasta counties. Nationally, researchers have tallied roughly 70 documented cases of officers misusing the systems for personal purposes — including a former Riverside County sheriff’s deputy sentenced to six years in prison in February after using the technology to stalk his former fiancée. A Los Angeles Police Department audit released in July found that fully one in three vehicles the cameras flagged as stolen were misidentified, a false-positive rate serious enough to risk violent confrontations with innocent drivers.
California’s own Attorney General has separately documented a pattern of unlawful data sharing. Since June 2024, the Attorney General’s office has contacted 18 law enforcement agencies over possible or confirmed violations of the state law barring departments from sharing license plate data with out-of-state or federal agencies, and has filed suit against the city of El Cajon, near San Diego, to stop the practice. CalMatters reporting has separately documented Southern California agencies routinely sharing license plate data with federal immigration enforcers in violation of that same law — precisely the misuse Cervantes’s bill was designed to curb.
The public mood appears to be shifting faster than the Legislature. More than 200 cities or law enforcement agencies nationwide terminated their license plate reader contracts in August alone — the fastest pace of cancellations since 2021 — according to the advocacy group Secure Justice. Police departments in Los Angeles and Redwood City, along with elected officials in El Cerrito and Campbell, have all ended their contracts with the leading vendor, Flock Safety, in recent weeks. Oakland activist Crystal Zermeño, who protested outside City Hall after the bill’s collapse, asked the question now hanging over Sacramento: how the state lacks the political will to act at a moment when federal immigration enforcement is intensifying and residents have limited defenses against it.
Cervantes has vowed to try again next year, and the underlying dynamics that have defeated five consecutive bills — a well-organized law enforcement lobby, genuine value the technology provides in solving crimes, and lawmakers’ evident reluctance to be characterized as soft on public safety — show no sign of resolving themselves. What has changed is the backdrop: a documented record of misuse, a governor who has already vetoed one reform effort, and a public increasingly willing to act locally, city by city, in the absence of statewide rules. For California residents whose driving patterns are logged by roughly 230 police agencies with no comprehensive statutory limits on how that data is used, the accountability gap Sacramento left unaddressed this year remains exactly where it started.
Human-Directed AI Journalism — This article was researched and structured under direct human editorial direction, with AI assistance in drafting. All facts, sourcing, and conclusions were reviewed by the author prior to publication.