Saratoga has flock cameras blue hills elementary neighborhood @npr @deflock
The short version: A local resident's phone footage shows Flock ALPR cameras posted near Blue Hills Elementary in Saratoga, raising fresh questions about surveillance creeping into school zones.
Our Take
Credit to AC Sincere Villanueva for grabbing a camera and documenting what a lot of residents don't notice until someone points it out: a Flock Safety ALPR camera sitting near a neighborhood elementary school. No press release, no community meeting footage, just a pole with a camera quietly logging every plate that drives past kids walking to class.
This is the pattern we track constantly at DeFlock The USA. These systems rarely get installed with the kind of public debate you'd expect for a tool that captures location data on every vehicle, parent, bus, and delivery driver passing a school. Once it's up, there's no telling how long the data sits, who can query it, or whether it ever gets audited. Putting that infrastructure near a school doesn't make kids safer — it just means the surveillance net starts earlier in people's lives.
If you want to see whether there's a camera like this near your own neighborhood or your kid's school, check the map. And if Saratoga residents want to push back on cameras going up without public input, our take-action page has steps for raising it at the city or school board level.
This is DeFlock The USA’s original commentary. The video above is the work of AC sincere Villanueva, published on YouTube — full credit to the creator.