Community Meeting - Flock Cameras - Thursday October 24, 2024
The short version: Carmel-by-the-Sea held a public meeting to hash out how many Flock ALPR cameras it wants and where, a rare chance for residents to shape surveillance before it's locked in.
Our Take
Credit to the City of Carmel-by-the-Sea for actually putting this decision in front of the public before the cameras go up, rather than after. An "ad hoc" committee gathering input on number and placement sounds bureaucratic, but it's the exact moment where a small town either gets a handful of cameras at known trouble spots or ends up with a dragnet that logs every car entering and leaving the village. Once the poles are in the ground, they rarely come out.
What matters here is precedent. Small, wealthy, tourist-heavy towns like Carmel are prime targets for Flock's pitch, and local officials often don't grasp that "a few cameras" can still generate a searchable database of everyone's movements, shared with other agencies and sometimes federal partners with zero local oversight. A community meeting is the one point where residents can ask hard questions: who audits the data, how long is it kept, does ICE or other outside agencies get access, and what happens when the ad hoc committee's mandate ends and nobody's watching anymore.
If you're in Carmel or anywhere else facing this same rollout, don't wait for the vote to be final. Check our map to see what's already deployed near you, and use our take-action guide to push your council for real limits before the contract is signed.
This is DeFlock The USA’s original commentary. The video above is the work of City of Carmel-by-the-Sea, published on YouTube — full credit to the creator.