Puyallup contract for controversial license plate cameras is up. Will they renew?
AI-generated summary reviewed by our newsroom.
- Puyallup weighs renewing expired Flock contract after new state law.
- Police cite crime drops and arrests from fixed Flock and mobile ALPR cameras.
- Driver’s Privacy Act restricts sharing, retention (21 days) and camera locations.
When you drive to or from Puyallup, you will cross paths with one of the city’s Flock cameras.
The Automated License Plate Recognition (ALPR) cameras take a picture of your license plate as you pass by. Your vehicle and license plate information then flows into the Puyallup Police Department’s network, where most people’s data sits for 21 days before being deleted. In that time, law enforcement agencies can share details from the cameras with one another, designed to allow officers to track criminal suspects as they travel from city to city.
Puyallup’s two-year contract with the cameras’ vendor, Flock Safety, recently expired — leaving the city at a crossroads on whether to renew it amid new legislation and an ongoing national debate about the implications of the technology.
Proponents applaud the cameras’ effectiveness in aiding police officers and helping solve crime. Opponents worry about mass surveillance and data from the cameras being used by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to aid in the Trump Administration’s deportation campaign.
The News Tribune previously reported on Puyallup’s decision to enter into the two-year contract with Atlanta-based Flock Safety on Dec. 15, 2023. City council documents say the contract cost the city $246,550. Puyallup is one of several cities in Pierce County to use Flock cameras, including Lakewood, Bonney Lake and Sumner.
Ned Witting, mayor of Puyallup, told The News Tribune the city wanted to monitor changes at the state level before deciding whether to renew the contract.
“It has expired, but we’re still using it and we were waiting for the state Legislature to do its thing before we renewed,” Witting said about Senate Bill 6002, deemed the “Driver’s Privacy Act.”
The bill — which introduces new regulations around where the cameras can be placed and how long law enforcement agencies can retain the data — became law on March 30, 2026, when Gov. Bob Ferguson signed it.
Witting told The News Tribune the city is still figuring out what changes it needs to make in order to comply with the law.
Scott Engle, chief of the Puyallup Police Department, told The News Tribune on April 7 that the cameras are a “tremendous tool” for the department, allowing them to solve crimes and locate missing, elderly and endangered people.
“I think there’s obviously lots of public interest in this, not just from the negative folks who don’t want cameras,” Engle said. “There are tons of people out there who do want the cameras because they have been victims of crime, and we’ve been able to help them get their property back or make an arrest, and I think sometimes, that gets buried in this discussion.”
Both Engle and Witting said the PPD doesn’t cooperate with federal agencies like ICE, because doing so would violate state law.
One resident who has voiced concerns about the cameras is Jeff Bennett, a former PPD police officer and city council candidate. In an interview with The News Tribune on March 27, Bennett said he wants to see a public statement from the city about its camera system and more transparency about how the city uses data from these cameras.
“The City of Puyallup citizens need to be told or have it explained to us, have the information available that the camera data is not being shared with the federal government and if it is, we need to be told that it is instead of this extremely ambiguous area that they’re floating in,” Bennett said.
The News Tribune searched for answers.
What is Puyallup’s Flock camera system?
Engle told The News Tribune PPD uses two programs: one is a mobile program with in-dash cameras and two patrol vehicles that have ALPR cameras on the roof of the cars. This program is through vendor Axon Enterprise.
PPD turned off its mobile cameras on March 13, ahead of the passage of the Driver’s Privacy Act, Engle said, because there is no guaranteed way to use them and follow the law, which requires officers to keep the cameras a certain distance away from churches, schools, courts and food banks.
The other program PPD uses is administered by Flock, Engle said, and consists of 39 cameras across the city, with each one fixed in one location and taking pictures of license plates from every car passing by.
Engle forwarded The News Tribune an email he wrote to the mayor and city council on Jan. 30. In the email, he said there are also several private businesses that use Flock cameras on their properties, including five cameras at the South Hill Mall, four at Home Depot, three at Dick’s Sporting Goods, three at Lowe’s and one at “a private multiple family housing complex.”
In an interview with The News Tribune on April 1, Witting described how the cameras worked, using a hypothetical scenario of someone stealing a bicycle and throwing it into the back of a white pickup truck.
“If somebody sees a white pickup truck leaving the scene of the crime, but they’re too far away to see a license plate, (officers) go through the Flock cameras and see which white pickup trucks went by at that point in time,” Witting said.
If the truck goes to another city that uses Flock cameras, like Auburn, PPD can access Auburn’s data, Witting said, since the two agencies have an agreement where they allow access to each other’s networks. Flock requires every user to enter a reason before accessing another department’s network, so the police officer in this case would type in something like “bicycle theft.”
“As the vehicles move from city to city, (if) the other city has Flock cameras, then we can access that,” Witting said. “We have had incidents where somebody’s driven from here to Auburn, I believe, and we’ve been able to see where those vehicles go.”
Engle told The News Tribune agreements can happen one of three ways:
- Two departments can make an agreement to access each other’s data in advance.
- Another department could approach PPD and request to access their data if they believe doing so would help solve a crime in their town.
- Another department can ask PPD to search for them. For example, a department who doesn’t have access to PPD’s data could call PPD and ask them to search their Flock cameras for a specific license plate number tied to a suspect.
The Dec. 5, 2023 city council agenda says it cost the city $246,550 to buy the software and equipment. Kevin Gill, spokesperson for PPD, told The News Tribune in an April 7 email that the department has paid $3,306 per month for the cameras since the contract ended, which “includes our public safety cameras in the parks.”
According to a Frequently Asked Questions section on the Flock Safety website, cameras also issue “Hot List alerts,” which means a camera sends an alert to law enforcement if it spots a wanted car.
“Our cameras have an integration with the (National Crime Information Center), a database of known wanted vehicles,” Flock’s website says. “That means when a camera detects a wanted car, an alert automatically will go to local law enforcement.”
PPD has an online transparency portal for its Flock cameras, which residents can visit at transparency.flocksafety.com/puyallup-wa-pd. According to the transparency portal, PPD retains the data from these cameras for 21 days.
The transparency portal also says the cameras only detect license plates and vehicles, not “facial recognition, people, gender (and) race.”
Prohibited uses, according to the transparency portal, include “immigration enforcement, traffic enforcement, harassment or intimidation, usage based solely on a protected class (i.e. race, sex, religion), personal use.”
The transparency portal said that as of April 2, the cameras had detected 670,863 vehicles in the past 30 days and issued 2,141 hot list hits in that time frame. There had been 443 searches in Puyallup’s database.
Who can access Puyallup’s data?
On Oct. 21, 2025, the University of Washington released a study that found federal immigration authorities accessed data from Flock cameras in other Pierce County cities.
Researchers from UW’s Center for Human Rights said U.S. Border Patrol had “back door” access to data from at least 10 police departments in the state that had not explicitly authorized Border Patrol searches. The departments included Lakewood and Eatonville, The News Tribune previously reported.
Lakewood Police Chief Patrick Smith previously told The News Tribune this happened through the national lookup feature, a national sharing network that allows Flock users across the country to search for a specific vehicle involved in a crime. Both Lakewood and Eatonville previously told The News Tribune they disabled the feature.
At the time the study was published, researchers said they were waiting for results from a public records request from the Puyallup Police Department. In a follow-up email with The News Tribune on March 26, Phil Neff — the research coordinator for the Center for Human Rights — said PPD has released the records in installments after the study was published, and the records they have so far indicate PPD had enabled the national lookup feature, which would have allowed U.S. Border Patrol and ICE to search their database.
Neff told The News Tribune that Flock operated a pilot program with federal agencies from May to August 2025, and researchers are still waiting for PPD’s audits from those months.
In his email to the mayor and council, Engle said the department had inadvertently been using the national lookup feature, but disabled it in October.
“After media attention in our area about ICE gaining access to Flock camera networks, we conducted a review of our local Puyallup Flock network. Our review did not show any direct use of our system by ICE or our officers aiding ICE,” Engle wrote. “... After contacting Flock to better understand how agencies outside our area were able to run such a query, we adjusted our system settings for what agencies could access our system. It is called national look-up, and we disabled that on October 22, 2025.”
Engle wrote that they did find activity from the Miami-Dade Police Department, which searched Puyallup’s records through the national lookup feature as part of a nationwide search. The Miami-Dade Police Department listed “immigration” as the reason for the search.
In UW’s study, researchers also noted that PPD made searches for “USPIS,” — which is short for U.S. Postal Inspection Service, the law enforcement branch of the United States Postal Service — in the Chehalis Police Department’s Flock network on July 16, 2025 and in the Douglas County Sheriff’s Office, Lakewood Police Department and Renton Police Department’s networks on July 17, 2025.
This was not part of the national lookup feature, but researchers noted that PPD officers making a search for USPIS was noteworthy because USPIS “has reportedly been enlisted as a source of targeting for immigration enforcement in recent months.”
In his interview with The News Tribune, Engle said the USPIS search was related to a string of community mailbox break-ins and package thefts PPD has grappled with over the past year.
“Nobody remembers the United States Postal Inspection Service asking us to do anything at all with immigration, we have absolutely worked with the postal inspector on mailbox thefts,” Engle said. “Had we been asked to do that, we wouldn’t do that because of Washington state law, it’s against the law for us to do anything with immigration.”
Neff said UW’s researchers no longer believe Border Patrol or ICE can directly access Flock networks.
“Our review of more recent audits from other agencies suggests that U.S. Border Patrol and ICE HSI no longer have access to Flock networks, at least in Washington state, which is consistent with the company’s public statements,” Neff wrote. “However, if local agencies continue to share their networks with out-of-state agencies, they may still be subjected to ‘side-door’ searches by other law enforcement agencies on behalf of federal immigration enforcement agencies.”
Flock released a statement in response to the UW study on Oct. 22, 2025, which said the company had removed federal agencies from the national lookup feature on Aug. 25, 2025. The company maintained that data sharing is controlled entirely by the police department, not by Flock.
“If agencies choose to collaborate with federal agencies, that is wholly up to them. Flock never enrolls agencies in automatic data sharing, and sharing relationships can be revoked at any time,” the company wrote.
Engle wrote in his email to council that PPD changed its settings on Nov. 17, 2025, so only organizations in Washington state can access its Flock camera data. He also said the Criminal Investigations Division Captain reviews the Flock audit monthly, and that PPD has “not identified any misuse by our staff.”
“We are only allowing Washington state law enforcement to access our data because those agencies in Washington state should be following Washington state law,” Engle told The News Tribune. “We did make that change to ... hopefully, alleviate fears from people [about] out-of-state people who have different laws.”
Where does state law come into play?
State law forbids law enforcement agencies from cooperating with federal authorities on immigration, according to the 2019 Keep Washington Working Act.
The transparency portal says PPD has granted 91 agencies access to its Flock camera data, all in Washington state. Out of these 91 agencies, 88 are law enforcement. Three that aren’t law enforcement agencies are the King County International Airport, Town of Harrah and Town of Hunts Point.
Bennett said even with these limitations, he feels uneasy about how the data is shared.
“I gave my whole adult life to law enforcement, I believe that some of the best people in the whole wide world were the cops that I worked with, but I also understand that any system is only as strong as its weakest link,” Bennett said. “So, if we are sharing very sensitive data with every law enforcement agency in Washington state that is also part of the Flock program, how are those other law enforcement agencies being vetted as far as their security procedures?”
The News Tribune asked Engle this question. He said the department has a page that pops up when an agency accesses their data, reminding other agencies to follow state law — but besides that, the department acts “in good faith.”
“We go the extra step of having that statement that they’re going to see when they request access, ‘You have to be following Washington state law,’” Engle said. “If we were to become aware of an agency not following Washington state law, we would absolutely revoke their permissions, but we are assuming good faith in a law enforcement agency — ‘you are a reputable agency in Washington state and you should be following the law.’”
Bennett referenced new language the city council added to Puyallup’s comprehensive plan last year, which directed the city to follow federal executive orders. He said he wants to know how this language in the comprehensive plan squares with police departments being forbidden to cooperate with ICE under state law.
The city attorney, Joseph Beck, said in an email to The News Tribune on April 3 that the comprehensive plan does not prioritize presidential executive orders over state law.
“The relevant language states that the Plan is to be implemented in compliance with applicable federal, state, and local civil rights laws, and it references relevant federal executive orders in that context,” Beck wrote. “It does not state that federal executive orders supersede Washington law. Additionally, the federal executive orders relevant to civil rights laws that I am aware of do not include any immigration related provisions.”
Beck said the comprehensive plan has no impact on law enforcement operations.
“City police practice is governed by applicable law and department policy. In Washington, state law places limits on local law enforcement participation in civil federal immigration enforcement,” Beck wrote. “... So, to answer your question directly: no, the Comprehensive Plan language does not override state law, and it does not change the legal framework that governs whether and how the Police Department may interact with federal immigration authorities.”
‘I cannot recall a time when crime dropped so significantly’
In his email to the council, Engle said crime rates have plummeted in Puyallup because of the Flock cameras.
“In my career, I cannot recall a time when crime dropped so significantly year over year in property or societal crime,” Engle said. “We attribute our drop in crime partially to our Flock camera network and the use of that technology by our officers and detectives.”
Engle said the Flock data was most often used for possession of stolen property, motor vehicle theft and robbery cases. He said from 2024 to 2025, motor vehicle theft decreased by 71%, robbery by 29% and aggravated assault by 31%.
“There were over 433 crimes investigated where our Flock network was used (and) over 136 arrests made,” Engle wrote.
Witting said the cameras have also made it safer for officers to pursue suspects.
“Active pursuits of vehicles is pretty dangerous — you have people driving at high rates of speed and then accidents happen and people are hurt,” Witting said. “The idea is that we get away from the kind of physical, active pursuit and use automation to accomplish the same purpose, so these Flock cameras can track the vehicles without anybody having to pursue them.”
He also said the cameras prevent future crimes.
“You’re able to catch up with people so they don’t recommit crimes over and over again. We catch them on the first or second round,” Witting said. “In the area of auto thefts, if somebody is stealing a bunch of cars, and they’re set up to take them to a chop shop and make money off of them? When you catch them, then that stops a lot of that future crime because it ends up being in a business.”
Transparency concerns
Bennett is a former PPD police officer who retired in 2022. He now works in the renewable energy field and, last year, ran for Puyallup City Council in hopes of unseating incumbent Jim Kastama, who represents District 1. He lost by a 63-vote margin, with 1,374 votes to Kastama’s 1,437.
He said his frustration with Flock started when the city approved the contract through a consent agenda, which the council uses to approve a batch of simple items like meeting minutes with a “yay” or “nay” vote.
“It should have been discussed as a city and, instead, it was firehosed through department heads by our council and greenlit on a consent agenda, not even discussed by the city council,” Bennett said.
City spokesperson Eric Johnson previously told The News Tribune in a 2023 statement that “these items are considered routine operational purchases that do not warrant additional public outreach,” adding that officials rely on law enforcement to determine what tools are needed to keep the community safe.
The News Tribune asked Witting if the city will hold any public hearings, discussions or meetings ahead of renewing its contract with Flock, and he said the city is still figuring out how it wants to approach a potential contract renewal.
Bennett told The News Tribune he has had six people reach out to him with questions and concerns about the Flock cameras, and that he is frustrated with the city’s lack of transparency about the issue since the UW study came out.
“There has been no open discussion or fact finding or information from this city,” Bennett said.
When The News Tribune asked Witting about that, he said the city had been waiting until the legislative session ended to issue a public statement about where they stand on the cameras.
“I’ve been advocating for that myself, putting out more of a public statement than we have, but we’ve been holding off on that because of the state legislation,” Witting said. “We didn’t want to go public with something that would end up changing until the session was over, and we didn’t know what kind of regulation we would have coming out of it.”
Bennett also said he wishes the transparency portal was more prominent on the city and police department’s websites, and is wary of the portal being run by Flock and not the city itself.
“The city of Puyallup is relying on this vendor to give information about how extremely sensitive and private data is being dispensed,” Bennett said. “Flock is the link that explains the camera, not our city leadership.”
What is the city planning to do in the wake of new legislation?
While some cities across the state are championing Flock cameras, others have abandoned them.
“Eatonville terminated our contract with Flock,” mayor Emily McFadden wrote in an April 3 email to The News Tribune. “They are currently off and waiting to be removed from town.”
McFadden’s email did not say when the city turned off its cameras or why they terminated the contract. Its transparency portal has been deactivated.
In December, Olympia announced it would deactivate its Flock cameras to consider concerns raised by the community. Everett, Redmond and Lynnwood have also turned off their Flock cameras, The Seattle Times reported on March 10.
Gig Harbor considered adopting Flock cameras in March 2025, but only two council members voted to approve the contract, with five opposing it.
Ferguson signed the Driver’s Privacy Act on March 30, which imposes regulations on how ALPR cameras can be used. The measure passed the state Senate 40-9, with all 30 Democrats and 10 Republicans voting yes. It later passed the state House 84-10, with 56 Democrats and 28 Republicans in support.
The bill:
- Prohibits using ALPR cameras for “immigration investigation or enforcement, tracking protected activities — free speech — or collecting data near protected health care or immigration facilities.”
- Prohibits ALPR cameras in the “premises or immediate surrounding” of schools, churches, courts or food banks.
- Requires ALPR data be deleted within 21 days, unless it’s part of an investigation or court case.
- Forbids law enforcement from sharing access to its network with anyone except for other state/local law enforcement agencies, or third-party ALPR vendors like Flock Safety.
- Exempts ALPR data from public records requests, “except for bona fide research that does not contain individually identifiable information.”
The changes went into effect immediately.
Engle said PPD has turned off its mobile cameras, since there is no way for officers to use them without accidentally breaking the law by, for example, driving close to a school while the cameras are in use.
“The in-car ALPR, we turned that off, and those will remain off until we can ensure that we are in compliance with the law,” Engle said. “Right now, I am not comfortable believing our in-car program would be in compliance with the law, so it will stay off until the vendor can come up with a geofencing solution or something like that.”
As for the Flock program, Engle said the department has examined all 39 cameras, and three of them could potentially be illegal.
“We have three cameras that are in play that we are currently looking at, whether they are or are not in violation of the law,” Engle said. “We need to take a hard look at where they’re located, and we’re working through that right now, but we’ve basically been able to go from 39 down to three that are in question, and if they are in violation, they’ll either be moved — because some of them, it’s a distance thing — or they’ll just be simply turned off.”
Puyallup is not alone in shutting off some of its cameras. The Pierce County Sheriff’s Office announced it would turn off its ALPR cameras on March 30. The Kennewick, Pasco and Richland police departments in the Tri-Cities area also shut off their cameras in response to the new legislation.
Witting said Puyallup is still figuring out its path forward, and the cameras remain active.
In an April 1 news release on its website, Flock said it is helping its Washington customers navigate the new law by:
- Implementing a 21-day retention period statewide
- Removing NCIC alert access
- Supporting agencies in removing cameras from prohibited locations
Flock said Washington already had automatic search filters which removed a Washington law enforcement agency’s network from any nationwide search related to immigration enforcement.
The News Tribune asked Engle if he wants the city to renew its contract with Flock — to which he said, “absolutely,” — and if so, what steps he plans to take.
The first step, he said, is to wait for the Washington State Attorney General’s Office to release best practices around the law. He said they have 180 days after the law’s passage to release that.
“There is some, what I would call, a gray area, in what is the definition of ‘immediate [surroundings],’ what does that mean in practice? I think the attorney general would define that,” Engle said. “Once they do that, we need to look at how many cameras does that impact for us? Then you have to have the discussion of, does it even make sense to continue the program if half of your cameras are essentially out of play because of the definition of immediate?”
Engle said if a “great majority” of the city’s cameras stand up to that scrutiny, he wants to have a discussion with the council and citizens.
“The dream scenario, for me, would be to go to council and present on that and let council decide which way they want to go. It’s a policy decision,” Engle said. “All I can do is come forward, put the information forward, share how we’ve already used it, share how we’d like to continue using it, and make a good recommendation.”
News Tribune archives contributed to this report.
This story was originally published April 8, 2026 at 5:00 AM.
