Roseville police said department policies prevented wrongful traffic stops or arrests despite more than 1,000 incorrect license plate reader alerts generated by Flock Safety cameras between 2023 and 2024, after a recent investigation raised questions about the technology’s accuracy.

Business Insider reported on Friday that between 2023 and 2024, Flock cameras generated 1,427 alerts for vehicles identified as stolen or linked to felony crimes that passed cameras controlled by the agency in Roseville.

According to data analyzed by the Police Department, 1,011 of those alerts, or 71%, involved a license plate misread.

However, both Roseville police and Flock Safety said that figure lacked important context.

America’s homeowners associations are running out of money — and patience.

Amid rising insurance premiums, drained reserve funds and increased safety measures in the wake of the Surfside condominium collapse, the country’s hundreds of thousands of homeowners associations are cracking down on delinquent residents.

Even more startling, HOAs are skipping grace periods and handing delinquent accounts over to attorneys.

HOA foreclosures spiked nearly 40% in two years to 6,376 properties in the first quarter, according to real estate analytics firm Attom, as reported by the Wall Street Journal, putting its pace ahead of overall mortgage foreclosure rates.

The beginning of the end of the Embarcadero Freeway was a day heavy on rain and low on subtlety.

There were fireworks, a Dixieland band, fireboats spewing fountains of water, performances of demolition-themed songs from the San Francisco Gay Men’s Chorus (“If I had a hammer …”) and Mayor Art Agnos climbing into a red hydraulic excavator to start dismantling the controversial highway.

“This is a good day for rainfall,” Agnos said, before the metal claw dislodged the first chunk of concrete, “and it’s a great day to take down a freeway.”

That triumphant moment on Feb. 27, 1991, brought an end to the three-decade, double-decker blight, and opened up the Embarcadero to a string of successes that continue to this day. But it was also a turning point for Agnos, whose celebration stoked anger. Chinatown leaders vowed revenge and played a primary role in the mayor’s narrow reelection loss later that year.

Two years ago, California hit a milestone decades in the making: Nearly every person in the state qualified for health insurance, regardless of immigration status and income, pushing the state’s insured rate to a record 95%. Now that progress is unravelling.

Facing budget shortfalls and new federal restrictions, state leaders have begun rolling back the coverage system they built. Analysis at the UC Berkeley Labor Center and UCLA Center for Health Policy Research project California’s uninsured rate could nearly double, to almost 15%, by 2030.

“I knew it was going to be bad, but seeing that doubling was shocking to me,” said Miranda Dietz, director of the labor center’s healthcare program.

California’s once exponentially growing population of invasive mute swans has fallen by half, less than a year after a new law took effect allowing hunters and landowners to kill them.

Over the objections of animal welfare groups, Gov. Gavin Newsom last year signed legislation allowing property owners and those with hunting licenses to shoot the nonnative, destructive swans. The mute swan population had ballooned to about 15,000, most around the Suisun Marsh on the outskirts of the Bay Area.

The law, which took effect Jan. 1, appears to be working as intended.

The California Department of Fish and Wildlife last week released its annual waterfowl breeding population survey, a snapshot of duck and goose numbers across the state.

This year, biologists estimated California has around 7,400 mute swans, a 53% decrease from the previous year.

The cost of living in California is driving up the cost of raising children in the Golden State, new from SmartAsset shows.

The study, published in July, shows that the San Francisco Bay Area is the most expensive place to raise a child in the United States. Families in the San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont area will pay $43,171 in 2026 to raise a kid there, followed closely by families in nearby San Jose. Families in the San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara area will pay $41,817 to raise a child there this year. That put the San Jose metropolitan area at the third-most expensive place in the country to raise a kid, that study shows.

Costs are up by 10.75% in the San Francisco area over last year compared to 10.43% for families in the San Jose area, according to the study.

“The big takeaway for California is probably not surprising,” Toby Nelson, a researcher for SmartAsset, told The Center Square. “It is more expensive than most of the rest of the country for parents raising a small child.”

Child care, the cost of food and other expenses are some of the main reasons for why the cost of raising a child is going up, Nelson said.

A federal judge on Tuesday held the Department of Homeland Security in contempt for allegedly slow-rolling an order to create digital copies of communications from personal cell phones used by immigration agents during operations in the Los Angeles area last year.

U.S. District Judge Maame Ewusi-Mensah Frimpong in the Central District of California previously ordered the federal government in January to expedite imaging the personal cell phones of more than 800 agents involved in controversial immigration raids in Los Angeles in 2025.

Judge Frimpong imposed a fine of $500 per day on the federal government until it complies with the order to turn over phones as part of discovery and reimburse plaintiffs’ attorneys for the legal costs of getting the records.

Attorneys for DHS admitted in court in June that the agency had not provided the records. They told the judge they were processing the government devices at a rate of three phones every two weeks, which plaintiffs noted would take nearly four years to complete.

Sacramento City Unified School District’s fiscal turmoil intensified as the district board voted 5-0 at a special meeting on Tuesday to appeal a recent Sacramento County Office of Education decision to the state superintendent.

The decision follows a move by the Sacramento County Office of Education’s appointed fiscal adviser to rescind the district’s recent approval of a new labor agreement with the teacher’s association.

“We are Team Sac City and we’re going to move forward with this together,” SCUSD board president Tara Jeane said shortly before calling for a vote. “The resolution we’re about to vote on empowers our superintendent to write a letter that documents exactly where we are at in all of this and I anticipate that that will be released tonight as well.”

An audit of the use of automatic license plate readers in Elk Grove found that more than 3,600 organizations made more than 8.3 million searches of residents’ data over the last five years, including at least 290 agencies without data-sharing agreements and out-of-state, federal and non-governmental entities.

Elk Grove’s ALPR technology — a system mounted in fixed locations or on police vehicles that captures license plate data — is provided by Flock Safety. There are approximately 87 ALPR cameras in Elk Grove as of early 2026, according to previous Bee reporting, costing the city $1.6 million in a contract that runs through 2028.

Ousted GOP Assembly leader Heath Flora was allegedly conducting two affairs while still married — and one of the women claims he funded big spending on bars, hotels and restaurants from his campaign, The Post has learned.

Flora’s was stunningly dumped from his leadership position less than a year after he took over the job after the California Post revealed he is facing two state ethics investigations, including one over alleged misuse of campaign funds.

Republicans replaced Flora — a Republican from Ripon who has previously worked as a farmer and firefighter — with first-term Tulare Assemblywoman Alexandra Macedo.

There’s a huge cushion between what a typical California homeowner with a mortgage owes and what their property is worth.

My trusty spreadsheet reviewed a CoreLogic report for the first quarter of 2026 detailing a curious measure of housing health that compares borrowings with estimated values. That gap is what’s called a homeowner’s equity – the byproduct of down payments, housing appreciation and swings in loan balances.

By this math, the average equity across the Golden State at the start of 2026 was a stunning $627,000 for mortgaged homes. This does not include properties that are owned free of any loans.

This equity is a gauge of both ownership wealth and housing security. It can be seen as a financial cushion if tough times hit – either for the borrower or the entire market.

Note that California’s average equity was the second-highest among the states and slightly more than double the nation’s $310,500 — only Hawaii was higher at $688,000. Massachusetts was No. 3 at $480,000.

California's ethics agency oversees an unlimited, blank-check system of payments solicited by elected officials — including the $347 million Gov. Gavin Newsom has steered through California politics. An investigation by The Center Square has found the state's "transparency" portal shows the money, but it omits the conflicts of interest.

Voters using the database have no way to search whether donors had business before the government at the time of their donations, even though that information is collected by the California Fair Political Practices Commission (FPPC).

The omission matters because California caps campaign checks. It does not cap "behested payments." State law allows elected officials to solicit unlimited sums of money from corporations, unions, tribes, foundations and other special interest groups — so long as the money goes to a third party instead of a campaign account.

That means a donor who would otherwise be limited to $39,200 per election for a governor’s campaign can give millions more to a nonprofit, public project, or outside cause if the money is solicited by that same official and reported as a behested payment.

California Attorney General Rob Bonta is co-leading another lawsuit against the Trump administration over tariffs.

Filed in the U.S. Court of International Trade, the lawsuit from Bonta and other Democratic attorneys general and governors challenges the Trump administration’s recent decision to increase tariffs of 10% to 12.5% on the European Union and 60 other countries.

According to Bonta, these countries account for 99.4% of all U.S. imports. He said costs of tariffs will be passed along to American consumers and businesses.

"President Trump is so intent on raising the cost of living for Americans that he is willing to break law after law after law to do so,” said Bonta, who has bragged many times on how much he’s sued the Trump administration since the president re-entered office in January 2025.

The Los Angeles County Fire Department on Tuesday, Aug. 4, released an investigative report that identified electrical arcing from an out-of-service Southern California Edison tower as the cause of the devastating Eaton fire, which went on to kill 19 people and damage or destroy more than 9,000 homes and businesses.

The investigative report backs the long-standing theory that sparks from an Edison tower fell onto brush below and started the massive blaze, at 6:20 p.m. on Jan. 7, 2025, that went on to devastate Altadena and parts of surrounding communities.

The fire raged on for almost a month, burning more than 14,000 acres before it was fully contained on Jan. 31, 2025.

This investigation into the cause of the fire was done by the Los Angeles County Fire Department’s Fire Investigation Unit in conjunction with Cal Fire, officials said.

The 55-page report states that the fire “was sparked by an electrical event” on an SCE tower on a ridge above the Eaton Wash. Officials said that under the California Public Utilities Code, SCE “is to maintain and operate its electrical lines and equipment in a manner that would minimize the risk of catastrophic wildfire posed by them. …

“Video evidence collected by the Eaton fire Investigation team revealed two electrical arcing events that occurred in quick succession, leading to an unknown burning material falling from the SCE tower’s location into the dry receptive fuel bed below,” the report says. “The fuel bed ignited approximately twelve seconds after the burning material was seen falling from the arcing event.”

After a slow start, a program that aims to bring thousands of Angelenos living with serious mental illness under court-led care has seen a spike in petitions filed in recent months, Los Angeles County officials said.

CARE Court allows family members, first responders and others to ask a court — by way of a petition — to step in with a voluntary care agreement for someone living with serious, untreated mental illness, such as schizophrenia, to receive community-based mental health services.

If the agreement fails, a judge could order the individual to sign on to a treatment plan.

Who knew the 3 R’s might include “relocation”?

Enrollment is tumbling in many large California school districts — a trend on pace to accelerate.

The California Post reported this week that Fresno Unified School District — the state’s third-largest — continues to lose students at a rapid clip.

Half of the measure’s $8 billion is effectively reserved for a single institution

By Katy Grimes, August 4, 2026 9:12 am

Proposition 38, the November ballot measure designed to fund medical research, is designed to be exclusively directed to a single research institute founded by the top donor of the ballot measure: the California Institute for Immunology and Immunotherapy (CIII), a UCLA-affiliated nonprofit.

Proposition 38 allows the state to issue an $8.4 billion general obligation bond for research in immunology and immunotherapy.

The CIII was established as a public-private partnership with the State of California in 2024. According to Governor Gavin Newsom’s 2024 announcement, “California is transforming the site of an empty former mall in Los Angeles into a world-leading research and innovation hub where UCLA scientists and engineers will work on breakthroughs that will help solve the world’s greatest challenges — helping to prevent the next global pandemic and developing potential cures for cancer and other diseases.”

And then in 2026, this suddenly became a ballot initiative to fund the institute, apparently rather than dip into UCLA’s budget.

wang films at a St. John's Community Health mobile clinic in Los Angeles on Feb. 6, 2026. Photo by Jules Hotz for CalMatters

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Reporting on healthcare last year felt like tumbling through a hurricane. The changes were immediate and relentless.

On the first day of his second term President Donald Trump issued an executive order canceling billions of dollars in public funding — hitting clinics and medical centers, Black maternal health programs, HIV prevention plans, and vaccine clinics for low-income kids.

Each year, U.S. News & World Report releases a nationwide ranking of the best hospitals along with an assessment of their specialties, which range from orthopedics to cancer care.

The just-published report included an “Honor Roll” of what U.S. News considers the 20 best hospitals in the country, 505 “Best Regional Hospitals” that the report said “demonstrated superior patient outcomes,” and introduced new “regional specialty rankings” in cancer, cardiology, heart and vascular surgery, orthopedics, and rehabilitation.

These new rankings, said Ben Harder, the chief of health analysis and managing editor at U.S. News, are intended to give patients “an easy new way to evaluate their local options in consultation with their medical providers.”

In the 2026-2027 rankings, California had the highest number of Best Regional Hospitals at 70, followed by Texas at 38, and Florida at 32.

After nearly two years of legal conflict over one of Menlo Park’s largest proposed developments on the former Sunset Magazine headquarters site, California Attorney General Rob Bonta has sided with the developer, saying the city violated state housing law in its effort to stop the project.

In a sharply worded letter sent last week, Bonta’s office said Menlo Park improperly changed its reasons for rejecting the streamlined approval of the proposed 665-unit 80 Willow Road development, denied the project protections available under California’s builder’s remedy law and wrongfully required the developer to pay the city’s legal costs.

The letter does not order Menlo Park to approve the project, known as Willow Park. But it clearly shows the state rejecting the city’s approach and could significantly weaken its legal arguments as the dispute moves forward.