Councilmember Rod Brewer calls surveillance of law-abiding citizens a “concession” He can live with

Our Take

Credit to ElkGroveNews for getting Councilmember Rod Brewer on record saying the quiet part out loud: blanket surveillance of people who've done nothing wrong is a "concession" he's willing to make for the sake of public safety. That's not common sense — that's the exact bargain every surveillance state asks its citizens to accept, just dressed up in friendlier language. The fact that he tied public anxiety about these systems to who sits in the White House, rather than to the technology itself, is telling. The problem isn't which party controls the cameras — it's that elected officials keep treating permanent, suspicionless tracking of every driver as a minor inconvenience rather than a fundamental shift in the relationship between residents and their government.

Flock Safety's ALPR network doesn't just catch the rare fleeing suspect; it logs the movements of everyone, law-abiding or not, and stores that data for other agencies, contractors, and sometimes federal partners to query later. When a councilmember says he's fine with that trade, he's making that call for an entire city's worth of people who never voted on whether their daily commute should become a permanent record. Elk Grove residents deserve a real debate about retention periods, audit access, and who can tap into this data — not a shrug and a buzzword.

If you want to see how far this has already spread, check our camera map to find ALPRs near you, and if you think Elk Grove's council should answer tougher questions, our take-action page has steps for pushing back before the "concession" becomes permanent policy.