Get the Flock Out: ICE Surveillance Is Not Safety

Our Take

Credit to the UCSC Center for Racial Justice, Pajaro Valley for Ethnic Studies and Justice, and Get The Flock Out Santa Cruz for putting a local face on a national problem. Their video does what a lot of policy debates fail to do: it connects the dots between a quiet city council vote to install ALPR cameras and the very real possibility that the data they collect ends up in the hands of ICE. That's not speculation — it's how these data-sharing pipelines are built, often with little public input and even less transparency about who gets access downstream.

This is the core issue we keep hammering on at DeFlock USA. Flock Safety markets its cameras as a tool for solving car break-ins and recovering stolen vehicles, but the system is architected to share plate reads across agencies and jurisdictions — including, in practice, with federal immigration enforcement. Communities that never agreed to help build a deportation dragnet are doing exactly that every time a camera on their street logs a plate. When local organizers call this a matter of "state violence," they're not being dramatic; they're describing the actual mechanics of networked surveillance infrastructure.

If you want to see whether cameras like these are already watching your neighborhood, check our camera map. And if Santa Cruz's organizing model inspires you to push back locally, our take-action page has concrete steps for getting these systems in front of your own city council before the contract gets renewed quietly.