Press to install Flock Safety devices directed at LA agency, emails are displayed

Since its founding more than a century ago, the Los Angeles Bureau of Street Lighting has been in the business of lighting and little else.

But in recent months, the city’s little-known agency has found itself embroiled in a heated debate over LA’s relationship with Flock Safety, a surveillance technology company criticized for providing data used to power the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown.

In LA, Flock uses dozens of automated license plate readers, which allow authorities to check vehicles reported stolen or registered to known fugitives, tracking their movements across the city.

The devices are often mounted on municipal light poles, making the Bureau of Street Lighting responsible for their installation.

Reports that Flock shared license plate data with federal authorities, including US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, prompted dozens of small cities across the country to end their relationships with the company. But in LA he still found willing customers, including the LAPD.

Hundreds of emails obtained by the Times through public records requests reveal how LAPD developers, homeowners associations and elected officials joined in a months-long campaign to pressure the Bureau of Street Lighting to speed up the installation of student plates.

Flock, which is headquartered in Atlanta, said it has contracts with about 5,000 US law enforcement agencies across the country, and that its technology complies with California law that limits what information can be shared with federal authorities. A company spokesperson said Flock’s technology is “built for transparency, accountability, and local control.”

“Our customers own and control their data, which is deleted after 30 days automatically,” MoMo Zhou said in a statement to The Times. “Our platform includes safeguards such as audit trails to help ensure accountability at every step. Every day, Flock supports communities across the country in tackling crime and finding missing people.”

The Bureau of Street Lighting, with 177 employees and a meager budget of $49.4 million, would seem an unlikely player in the broader debate about police oversight. It is primarily tasked with repairing and reinforcing the city’s more than 210,000 street lights – often targeted by copper wire thieves – and maintaining a network of electric car charging stations.

The push to install more plate readers comes amid calls for transparency about the Los Angeles Police Department’s dealings with Flock. In March, the Police Commission asked the Department to report what information the company’s scanners collect and share. Months ago, the commission refused to approve Flock’s camera donations.

The commission has ordered its inspector general to conduct an investigation into the LAPD’s use of license plate reader technology, the findings of which are expected to be released this summer.

Recently, Council Member Ysabel Jurado presented a motion urging the commission to “refrain from entering into any new Memorandum of Understanding, Contracts, or other Agreements, or implementing any inspection programs with Flock Safety or its officials.” LAPD officials said last month that the city attorney’s office was working on a formal contract with Flock.

However, behind the scenes, pressure to work with Flock has been mounting from other council offices and community groups.

When a representative from the office of Councilor Katy Yaroslavsky sent an email to the street lighting office requesting speed, she received a reply saying that the installation process should not be accelerated because some of the city’s light poles cannot support the weight of the Flock student, which is usually powered by a solar panel.

“The last thing we need is for a pole to fall on someone or something in high winds,” the office’s Clinton Tsurui wrote in a June 4, 2025, email.

In another interview, Tsurui expressed frustration with a colleague who had given what he thought was an excellent timetable for installing new plate readers.

He wrote: “smh, the promising things we can’t do will catch up with us one day.”

The Los Angeles Police Foundation, a nonprofit group that has long registered equipment for the LAPD and provided other assistance, criticized the delay in installing Flock equipment. Last year, the foundation helped donate dozens of Flock cameras, most of which ended up in wealthy neighborhoods on the city’s Westside and San Fernando Valley.

Records show that in May 2025, Dana Katz, the organization’s executive director, contacted the mayor’s office with a request to waive the permit and recruitment fees associated with the enrollment of new students. Katz wrote in an email that the additional cost of $2,000 per machine was “too expensive and detrimental to public safety.”

Katz also pointed out that in some areas, there are no city-owned poles to install the equipment on – but he offered a possible solution.

“Flock has its pole approved by the County of Los Angeles for these conditions, and we would like the City to accept their use,” he wrote to Robert Clark, then-deputy mayor for public safety.

Several of LA’s historic street lights stand outside the Bureau of Street Lighting office near Virgil Avenue and Santa Monica Boulevard.

(Jason Armond/Los Angeles Times)

Katz also wrote to Clark on Aug. 6 asked why officials were estimating a six- to 12-month wait for new Flock students to be approved for public housing in the Cheviot Hills and Brentwood Park areas, where there were no existing city poles to jump into. He noted that the county engineering department has already approved the company’s stakes, and asked Clark if there was any way for the city to “go back on approving these organizations to expedite this so that these neighborhoods don’t have to wait so long to get help to prevent this home invasion?”

In the weeks that followed, Katz’s emails took on an urgent tone. In one of his last messages, email records show, he told an aide he expected more help than the mayor’s office was offering.

“With all due respect, the responses you have provided are completely generic and do not provide any guidance or direction on how to expedite this process,” he wrote.

He added: “I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again – this delay is a threat to public safety.”

A spokesperson for the mayor’s office told The Times that ultimately neither Clark nor an aide intervened on behalf of the Los Angeles Police Foundation.

Email records show Flock dating in the office for days at least until the spring of 2024, when the company agreed to donate two of its plate readers to help fight copper theft.

Tsurui emailed LAPD Capt. Celina Robles saying company executives have requested an in-person meeting with the office and the LAPD “to discuss the benefits of this product and how it can benefit the city moving forward.”

On June 24, 2024, a representative of DC firm Modern Fortis sent an email to Bureau of Street Lighting Director Miguel Sangalang seeking to “explore the public-private partnership” between Flock and the city. Sangalang took another meeting to discuss Flock a few months later with former City Council Member Joe Buscaino, who after leaving City Hall went to work for Ballard Partners, a powerful Florida-based firm.

In January 2025, after wildfires destroyed Pacific Palisades, Altadena and other areas, Flock intervened again. The company agreed to donate more than 50 license plate textbooks, free of charge for six months, to the affluent Palisades neighborhood, where residents and law enforcement officials were constantly on the lookout for potential theft.

Flock Safety license plate reader in Costa Mesa.

(Courtesy of the city of Costa Mesa)

In the days and weeks that followed, city and police officials continued to criticize the office for rushing the approval process.

On Jan. 21, 2025, records show, Cmdr. Randall “Randy” Goddard of the LAPD’s Information Technology Bureau wrote to street lighting officials to say the Palisades community “could use a great deal of kindness from your department.”

LAPD Chief Jim McDonnell “fully supports this and has been working with the City Attorney’s office to finalize the terms,” ​​Goddard wrote.