Council Member Burt demands Flock audit scope of work

Our Take

Credit to Matt Schlegel for capturing this exchange, because it cuts to something we harp on constantly: an "independent audit" is only as good as the questions it's actually told to ask. Council Member Pat Burt demanding that City Manager Ed Shikada produce the scope of work for OIR Group's review of Palo Alto's Flock Safety system isn't bureaucratic nitpicking — it's the whole ballgame. If the scope is written narrowly, or written by the same department that deployed the cameras in the first place, the audit can come back clean no matter what the system is actually doing with residents' driving data.

This is the pattern we see city after city: a surveillance system gets installed quietly, public pressure forces some kind of oversight promise, and then the terms of that oversight get negotiated behind closed doors with zero input from the people being watched. A real audit scope should answer basic questions — who can query the ALPR database, for what reasons, how long is data retained, is it shared with ICE or other outside agencies, and what happens when someone misuses access. Burt is right to ask for that scope in public, before the audit happens, not after.

If you want to know whether Flock or other ALPR cameras are already watching your commute, check our map. And if your city is quietly expanding or renewing a Flock contract without this kind of scrutiny, our take-action page has concrete steps for getting answers before the cameras go up, not after.