5/11/26 Aspen City Council Work Session

Our Take

The City of Aspen's own channel just dropped footage from a work session where council members are reportedly weighing whether to bring automated license plate readers into their mountain town. We haven't seen a transcript breakdown from a journalist yet, so we're not going to speculate on vote counts or specific vendor pitches — but the mere fact that this is on a work session agenda is worth flagging. Work sessions are where policy gets shaped before it ever reaches a public vote, which means now, not later, is when residents have the most leverage to ask hard questions.

Aspen wouldn't be the first small city to get courted by Flock Safety or a similar vendor promising to solve crime with a network of cameras scanning every plate that drives through. What rarely gets the same airtime is who holds the data, how long it's retained, which agencies can query it, and whether any of that is audited once the ribbon-cutting photos are over. Ski towns and resort communities are especially juicy targets for this kind of pitch because tourist traffic creates an easy 'public safety' narrative, even when the actual crime data doesn't support blanket surveillance of everyone passing through.

Credit to the City of Aspen for keeping the meeting public and online — transparency matters, and we'd rather have the footage than not. If you're in Aspen or anywhere in Colorado, this is the moment to show up, ask where the data goes, and demand retention limits and audit logs in writing before any cameras are bolted to a pole. Check our camera map to see what's already deployed near you, and hit our take-action page for a template on pushing back at the local level.