Remove Flock! urges Palo Alto resident #deflock #paloalto

Our Take

Credit to Matt Schlegel for getting a camera in the room during public comment, because these moments rarely make it past the council chamber otherwise. A resident standing up and telling Palo Alto to cut ties with Flock Safety is exactly the kind of grassroots friction that actually moves policy — not press releases from the company, not vendor demos, but regular people saying "not in my city."

Palo Alto is a useful case study precisely because it's not a struggling Rust Belt town desperate for a tech fix — it's the literal backyard of Silicon Valley, a place that should understand better than anywhere how quickly a 'temporary pilot' of license plate readers turns into a permanent, unaccountable surveillance net. Once a city signs a Flock contract, the cameras log every plate that passes, the data gets shared across a sprawling network of other agencies, and there's rarely a clean way to claw that back. That's the pattern we track across the country.

If you want to see whether your own neighborhood has quietly joined that network, check our camera map, and if you're ready to push back the way this Palo Alto resident did, our take-action page has the tools to help you make your case at the next council meeting.