10 For weeks the City published a superseded policy with no mandatory audit requirementnew
A resident, not the City, noticed that the ALPR policy on the website had no quarterly-audit section. The Chief confirmed it was the old version.
On 2025-09-08 a member of the public wrote to City Manager Mario Giuliani:
“I found a screenshot from 7/16/25 to support my assertion that the ALPR Policy has been manually modified. I’ve included the same section (470.8) dated today, 9/8/25. You’ll note that the ’new’ amendments reflect a change from Auditing to Training. I’d like to understand how this happened outside of Council’s purview.”
Chief Mark Menesini confirmed it the same afternoon:
“This current one online is the old policy version. Last week we were cleaning up broken links…” — and scripted the reply back to the resident: “thanks so much for catching this error, and that it will be corrected ASAP.”
The two versions are both in the record, and the difference is substantive:
Stale version served publicly (ALPR_Policy.pdf) |
Current version (ALPR_policy_2025.pdf) |
|
|---|---|---|
| § 470.8 | TRAINING | ALPR DATA DETECTION BROWSING AUDITS |
| Audit requirement | 470.6(c): “ALPR system audits should be conducted on a regular basis.” | Mandatory quarterly audit by the Services Lieutenant; random sample of ≥10 detection-browsing inquiries; memorandum to the Chief; retained |
| Mentions of “audit” | 1 | 6 |
Why it matters. The quarterly §470.9 audits produced under PR-2026-155 — the ones that sampled 10 searches per quarter and passed 100% every time (finding #8) — rest on the very section that was missing from the policy the City was publishing. For at least the window 2025-07-16 → 2025-09-08, a resident checking whether Benicia audited its ALPR use would have been told, by the City’s own published policy, only that audits “should” happen “on a regular basis.”
Note the stale file’s name: ALPR_Policy.pdf — the same filename as the city-website URL
Benicia PD sent Flock in 2021 (…/uploads/ALPR_Policy.pdf). The adopted policy lives in
Lexipol; the website pointed at a static 2021 PDF.
In fairness: when Council Member Lionel Largaespada answered residents on 2025-10-03 and 10-06, the section numbers cited (470.7/470.9 for the ICE–CBP prohibition, 470.8 for quarterly audits, 470.3.1/470.4 for publication and penalties) match the current 2025 policy, which was attached to that reply. The gap is the Jul–Sep window, not the October correspondence.
Evidence: PR-2025-199/text/FW_ BPD Policy 470-Redacted.txt,
RE_ BPD Policy 470-Redacted.txt, PR-2025-199/policy-versions.csv,
PR-2025-199/attachments-text/ALPR_Policy.txt vs ALPR_policy_2025.txt
The documents behind this
Read them yourself — that is the point.
| Document | Request |
|---|---|
| FW_ BPD Policy 470-Redacted.pdf | PR-2025-199 |
| RE_ BPD Policy 470-Redacted.pdf | PR-2025-199 |
| ALPR_Policy.pdf | PR-2025-199 |
| ALPR_policy_2025.pdf | PR-2025-199 |
| PR-2025-199/policy-versions.csv — multiple documents in this request | PR-2025-199 |
Full write-up source: FINDINGS-2026-07-25.md in the records archive. Every
quotation is transcribed from a PDF the City produced under the California Public Records
Act. Redacted and image-only scans were run through OCR, so minor spacing artifacts may
remain; wording is unchanged.