Darth Vader attends San Diego city council meeting to support Flock cameras
The short version: A Darth Vader costume at a San Diego council meeting pushed Flock cameras, missing the irony of fronting for an empire built on surveillance and control.
Our Take
Courier California caught a genuinely bizarre moment: someone in a full Darth Vader costume stood up at a San Diego city council meeting to voice support for Flock Safety's camera network. The irony writes itself. Vader is pop culture's go-to symbol of an empire that tracks, surveils, and crushes dissent — and here he was cheering on a system that reporting across the country has tied to ICE access and open-ended police tracking with no clear investigative purpose.
Jokes aside, this is exactly the kind of public comment theater that surveillance companies benefit from. When council meetings get reduced to costume stunts, it's easier to wave off serious questions: who gets access to these camera feeds, how long is the data kept, and what stops local police from becoming a pipeline for federal immigration enforcement. Those questions don't go away just because someone showed up in a cape.
San Diego isn't an outlier — this fight is happening in city council chambers nationwide, often with far less spectacle and far less scrutiny. If you want to see what's already watching your own neighborhood, check our camera map, and if you're ready to push back at your next council meeting, our take-action resources can help you get started.
This is DeFlock The USA’s original commentary. The video above is the work of Courier California, published on YouTube — full credit to the creator.