Flock cameras in Los Angeles

Our Take

Credit to Los Angeles Friends for putting a spotlight on something most city council meetings bury in a consent agenda: a sitting mayoral candidate, Rae Huang, publicly calling for LA to tear up its contract with Flock Safety. That's a bigger deal than it might sound. Once a city signs on with Flock, the cameras tend to multiply quietly, budget line by budget line, with little public debate about who gets access to the data or how long it's kept. A candidate willing to make cancellation a campaign issue forces that conversation into the open, where it belongs.

LA is exactly the kind of jurisdiction where this fight matters most. It's sprawling, politically fragmented across dozens of neighborhoods and contract cities, and already home to other surveillance tech stacked on top of ALPR networks. Every additional Flock camera isn't just one more lens, it's one more node feeding a searchable, networked record of where Angelenos drive, when, and how often. That data doesn't stay local; it can be queried by out-of-state agencies for reasons that have nothing to do with local public safety. Whether or not Huang's campaign goes anywhere, the underlying question, does your city actually need this infrastructure, is one every resident should be asking their own council members.

If you want to see whether Flock or similar ALPR systems are already running near you, check our camera map, and if you're in LA or anywhere else watching a contract renewal come up, our take-action page has concrete steps for showing up before the vote, not after the cameras are bolted to the pole.