El Cerrito residents call out Flock safety cameras

Our Take

Credit to KRON 4 and reporter Amanda Hari for giving El Cerrito residents a mic, because this is exactly how these systems get installed almost everywhere: quietly, with a public safety pitch, and little room for the community to weigh in before the cameras are already bolted to poles. Once a city council approves a Flock contract, the car is often already out of the garage — residents are left reacting to a surveillance network instead of shaping whether it exists at all.

What's notable here isn't just local annoyance, it's the pattern. El Cerrito joins a growing list of towns where people are asking the obvious questions Flock and police departments rarely answer upfront: who can access this data, how long is it kept, what happens when it's shared across jurisdictions or pulled into federal systems, and what oversight actually exists once the box is live. Those aren't paranoid questions. They're the baseline for any technology that logs the comings and goings of every driver, innocent or not, on a public street.

If you want to see how far this has spread beyond El Cerrito, check our camera map to find Flock installations near you, and if you want to push back the way these residents are starting to, our take-action guide walks through how to raise it with your own city council before the next contract gets signed.