San Jose has won the first round in a closely watched court fight over its network of automated license plate readers. A Santa Clara County Superior Court judge dismissed a lawsuit that argued police shouldn't be able to search the cameras' data without a warrant.
What the judge decided
In a ruling last Friday, Judge Jeffrey El-Hajj rejected claims that the city's practice of letting police search plate-reader data without a warrant violates the California Constitution's privacy protections and its ban on unreasonable searches, San José Spotlight reported. The network, supplied by the company Flock Safety, has roughly 500 cameras around the city. KQED reported that they scan hundreds of millions of plates a year and feed a searchable database that keeps the information for about a month.
El-Hajj leaned on a 2024 decision from California's 4th District Court of Appeal, which allowed footage from San Diego's streetlight cameras to be used in a murder prosecution and found that people have no reasonable expectation of privacy as they travel on public streets. The judge also rejected the argument that the sheer number of cameras in San Jose makes its system much more invasive, according to San José Spotlight.
Who sued, and what's next
The ACLU of Northern California and the Electronic Frontier Foundation filed the case in November 2025 on behalf of two groups that advocate for South Bay immigrants: the Services, Immigrant Rights and Education Network (SIREN) and the California chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations. They had asked the court to require a warrant before any search.
"We believe strongly that the ruling is wrong on the law, and all options for next steps are on the table," EFF surveillance litigation director Andrew Crocker told San José Spotlight. City Attorney Susana Alcala Wood said the dismissal shows the system "meets constitutional scrutiny" and only collects what can already be seen from public streets.
The ruling doesn't settle things. San Jose still faces a federal lawsuit from three residents who argue the cameras violate the Fourth Amendment and want to represent everyone in the city whose plate gets scanned, KQED reported. The city has asked for that case to be dismissed too.
A divided city
Supporters say the cameras have become a key crime-solving tool for a stretched police department. San Jose Inside reported they recently helped identify a vehicle tied to two men accused of posing as delivery workers to commit crimes around the South Bay. Critics point to a San Jose officer who was fired in April for allegedly sharing location data with his cousin, and to Santa Clara County, Mountain View and Los Altos Hills, which have cut ties with Flock. The City Council voted in March to shorten how long the data is kept from one year to 30 days, and some council members have proposed more safeguards.