Community members who applauded Bend City Council for turning off Flock Safety’s AI-powered surveillance cameras at a Jan. 7 business meeting weren’t paranoid.
Reporting by the Oregon Law Center has revealed that federal immigration officials — including those from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, U.S. Customs and Border Protection and U.S. Homeland Security Investigations — accessed the Bend Police Department’s Flock camera database 279 times in June 2025, during the first three weeks of what was supposed to be a year-long pilot program with Flock’s Automated License Plate Reader technology.
Bend PD didn’t authorize those queries by federal immigration authorities, and it’s unclear what, if any, data may have been retrieved, police officials said. Instead, a user error by a supervising captain unintentionally left the “Lookup” function in its factory-default “National” setting. Other Lookup options included “State” and “Local.”
Since June 4, 2025, Capt. Brian Beekman oversaw — and made quarterly audits of — the department’s ALPR usage. He told the Source he didn’t notice what National Lookup meant until June 25, when he immediately shut it off.
“We started with that feature on believing that it was a tool to inquire at a broader level than just Oregon,” said Beekman, describing new-to-the-department software interface that features toggle setting options for the Lookup function. “What we didn’t know is that National Lookup is a reciprocal sharing feature. In other words, when you turn that on, yes, you can query outside your state, but that actually turns on the ability for other agencies in the country to query information from your agency.”
Bend PD officials say it’s unknown what particular ALPR surveillance data the federal immigration authorities may have accessed, owing to Flock’s then-lack of a digital paper trail that would have shown exactly what data, if any, was retrieved by national searches cast by outside agencies.
That lack of a breadcrumb trail, as it were, had been addressed by Flock in subsequent software updates, allowing a fuller picture of past activity, Beekman said.
In November 2025, Beekman began conducting a wider audit when the Oregon Law Center submitted a Freedom of Information Act request for Bend PD’s Flock data, as it had for many other agencies in Oregon that used Flock’s ALPR data. (The Source requested that same report from Bend PD on April 30 and had not received it by press time.)
In fulfilling the request, Bend PD provided about 170,000 records, including internal audits, with license plate numbers redacted, to OLC.
Beekman noticed the 118 queries made by CBP during that three-week window in June 2025.
Sifting through the records, OLC analysists noticed that, too, along with the 161 additional instances of third-party, out-of-state law enforcement agencies acting on behalf of ICE, CBP and HSI. Many of those local departments are in southern states. OLC figured that out because the police department making the query had stated the reason for any particular search as “ICE,” “CBP” and “HSI,” the OLC confirmed about the February 2026 report.
Did federal immigration authorities violate Oregon’s Sanctuary Laws by using state resources such as data for immigration enforcement purposes?
A case could be made.
“Clarity and consistency“
On Dec.15, 2025, around the time Bend PD fulfilled OLC’s record request, Chief Mike Krantz sent an email to Bend city councilors.
“You may receive inquiries from constituents and seek answers from various sources, so this message is intended to provide clarity and consistency,” Krantz wrote. “Initially, National Lookup was active for three weeks by default, but we quickly disabled it. We briefly enabled State Lookup and plan to return to that setting to maximize investigative effectiveness while maintaining appropriate safeguards.”
Krantz also mentioned that Flock was facing national criticism for a short-term pilot program the Atlanta-based company had extended to DHS.
That pilot program allowed DHS agencies, including CBP and ICE and HSI, to access Flock’s data throughout the country between May and August 2025.
Bend PD’s National Lookup snafu came smack in the middle of that timeframe.
‘Keep the applause to a minimum’
At the Jan. 7 meeting when Bend city councilors announced they were shutting off Flock cameras effectively immediately, citizens’ distrust of police surveillance and immigration enforcement had reached a national crescendo.
Earlier in the day, ICE agent Jonathan Ross shot and killed Renée Good during Operation Metro Surge in Minneapolis.
Before that meeting, just before the Flock update, Catalina Sánchez Frank, executive director of the Latino Community Association, presented councilors with a report that detailed more than 1,000 deportations in Oregon since January 2025 — and more than 16 in Central Oregon. (At press time, Sánchez Frank told the Source that 846 deportations have been ordered in Oregon so far this year, compared to 3,161 in 2025.)
Additionally, Sánchez Frank told the City Council about community fears of U.S. Marshals helping with immigration enforcement, since having been deputized by the Trump Administration in January 2025 to do so, and of concerns about violations of state sanctuary laws and racial profiling.
“The common theme is fear,” Sánchez Frank said, acknowledging that next agenda item was the Flock update. “I’d like to make a verbal request that the City takes into serious consideration the equity impacts and risk of abuse [of Flock data] by ICE and DHS.”
Mayor Melanie Kebler began the Flock update by reiterating the City’s dedication to upholding sanctuary laws that prohibit the use of administrative warrants and barring local law enforcement from cooperating with feds.
Kebler said she’d spoken with colleagues and other city governments regarding privacy concerns and Flock cameras. Accordingly, she and the City Council voted to shut off the Flock cameras effective immediately, allowing the contract to expire on May 1.
The assembly broke out in cheers several times.
“We’ve heard the claps; please keep the applause to a minimum, please,” Kebler said.
Capt. Beekman then presented an update on the seven months with Flock ALPR technology, mentioning how the license plate readers on Highway 97 helped Bend PD recover stolen vehicles and bring a man suspected of sex crimes against a minor, and another of a stabbing, into custody. Beekman didn’t mention that federal immigration authorities had made all those queries during that three-week window.
“I certainly respect the input from the community and the concerns — in my opinion, some very valid concerns — about some of the vendors involved in this technology and some of the functions of this technology,” Beekman said. “But it is also incomplete without explaining some of the public safety benefits.”
“Not a privacy breach“
On May 4, the Source emailed questions to Kebler and City Manager Eric King about the Flock “privacy breach” involving ICE, CBP and HSI during that three-week window last June.
Kebler responded promptly. She forwarded the Dec.15 email Chief Krantz sent the City Council, adding that “‘privacy breach’ is a term that I take seriously and to me implies the overriding of security systems or someone gaining unauthorized access, and does not describe what was happening with our ALPR system in 2025.”
In a call with City Manager King, Kebler and Krantz, the police chief reiterated that a query by federal immigration officials doesn’t necessarily mean they got a hit. He said Bend PD doesn’t have evidence that any data was extracted from the Flock database.
“It’s actually very unlikely that information was provided,” Krantz said.
When Bend PD noticed the National Lookup was the default factory setting, Krantz said his department contacted Flock and told them that such national-level query access shouldn’t be the default setting.
A key feature of a new Automated License Plate Reader law, which Gov. Tina Kotek signed into law March 31, restricts the ALPR Lookup function to just state and local agencies, he added.
Mayor Kebler spoke up.
“We knew that there was a three-week period where the National Lookup was on; the chief informed us of that last year.”
When the Source reiterated the Oregon Law Center’s findings of inquiries by federal immigration authorities, Chief Krantz said that certainly could be the case.
“It’s important to understand the technology, right? It’s not localized to Bend. When you have National Lookup turned on and a New York detective puts in his computer [license plate] ABC-123, it sends a query to every National Lookup system,” Krantz said. “It’s not localized to Bend. It logs that as a lookup in every single system.”
But those are the queries that showed up in the Oregon Law Center’s findings that demonstrate ICE, CBP and HSI queries went through Bend PD’s National Lookup backdoor 279 times.
The three officials contend that the issue was “reported multiple times.” The Source can find no record of the issue being reported to the public.
“That was information that was out in the public,” Kebler said. “So that’s not something that we were hiding or people didn’t know about.”
Senate Bill 1516
Such vulnerabilities were exactly what Oregon lawmakers hoped to shore up with Senate Bill 1516, which Gov. Tina Kotek signed into law on March 31. In short, Oregon agencies can only share APLR with other Oregon agencies — full stop.
In speaking about the bill with the Oregon Capital Chronicle earlier this year, Sen. Floyd Prozanski, a Democrat from Eugene who is also the chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said: “We have the possibility of multiple law enforcement agencies in the state entering into contracts that may not have those private protections of data.”
Krantz served on Prozanski’s work group that also included representatives from the American Civil Liberties Union, Oregon State Police and Eyes Off Eugene, an advocacy group that successfully campaigned against Flock cameras in Eugene and Springfield.
Prozanski added that there may be the ability for other law enforcement agencies to gain access to that material for purposes that are against Oregon’s sanctuary laws, specifically sharing with the federal government or other states.
The new ALPR law maintains that law enforcement agencies may compare captured license plate data with information contained in records held by the Department of Transportation, databases maintained by the FBI’s National Crime Information Center, the Law Enforcement Data System maintained by the Department of State Police or the equivalent system maintained by another state, FBI records related to kidnappings and missing persons.
But local law enforcement agencies cannot allow sharing to agencies outside of Oregon.
Additionally, SB 1516 shortens the amount of time that law enforcement agencies can hold onto its ALPR data.
That which is not related to a court proceeding or ongoing criminal investigation may be retained for no more than 30 days after the imagery is collected. For captured license plate data related to a court proceeding or ongoing criminal investigation, the captured license plate data may be retained for the same period that evidence is retained in the normal course of the court’s business, according to the bill’s language.
Also, law enforcement agencies must receive audits every 30 days and provide audit reporting to the public.
The Sunriver Police Department, which uses ALPR technology, began publishing monthly audits online.
Krantz said his department is still working out details of how it will comply with SB 1516 as it pertains to the footage collected by Axon-brand ALPR-equipped dash cams mounted in about 70 police cruisers since July 2023, after city councilors approved a five-year, $679,500 contract in June 2022.
“Bend PD is already in line with 90% of what Senate Bill 1516 asks for,” Krantz said, owing that to his involvement on Prozanski’s work group. “I think the changes in the Senate bill will just make [protections] stronger. It provides the public with an understanding that there are pretty serious guardrails around the state and how [ALPR tech] is used and who has access to it.”
Reached by email, Catalina Sánchez Frank, the executive director of the Latino Community Association who made the presentation at the Jan. 7 meeting, says she thinks City Council immediately discontinuing the Flock program was a “true example of neighbors supporting neighbors.” Yet LCA was not aware of the data breach, she continued, “which is disappointing despite its open channel of communication with the Bend PD.
“The timing represents a concerning overlap, as June 2025 was an intense period of immigration law enforcement in our area,” Sánchez Frank said. “While it is difficult to definitively link the two, the coincidence is troubling. We are already aware of the intersections of data at the federal and state levels regarding health, income, and taxes; we expect our local government to do a much better job of protecting our private information and ensuring that technology used in our city does not become a tool for targeting vulnerable community members.”
This article appears in the Source May 7, 2026.
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I’d like people reading to have full information on one aspect of this story, which is otherwise accurate. Here is the OPB article that I was referring to when I said “that issue” had been reported to the public. My fault apparently for not being clear, as I thought I was, that I was referring to the issue of the three weeks national lookup being turned on. This article was sent to Peter yesterday, and he chose not to include in this story, instead leaving the reader to conclude no reporting at all had occurred. https://www.opb.org/article/2026/01/08/bend-flock-cameras-ai-license-plate-camera-law-enforcement/
Quote from the article: “Since community concern began in December, Bend has only shared its Flock data with other local law enforcement agencies, Miller said by phone. Before that, information was available statewide, and for the first three weeks of the pilot, the police department’s data was open to nationwide queries from other law enforcement agencies.”
To install a system that has such egregious, nefarious, and dangerous interface potential without fully understanding how it works is astounding. And telling.
I agree. That’s like being given a gun and saying “oh, that’s what the safety is for”!
Now we have speed and red light cameras that also read license plates.
C’mon now let’s keep some perspective. Yes, better care could have been taken to fully understand the system’s access capabilities prior to turning it on. And also, telematics in cars has been a thing since the 90s and I’m betting you carry a phone with you everywhere so describing ALPR systems as egregious, dangerous, and nefarious is a bit much. Let’s reserve those meaningful words for our current Department of Homeland Security which has decided to demonize a group of people who’ve mostly just committed a civil infraction yet all get treated as if they’re hardened felons.