Why California can't regulate Flock cameras after five failed efforts

Our Take

Five tries, five failures. That's the scoreboard ABC10 lays out, and it tells you everything about how entrenched ALPR surveillance has become in California politics. SB 1013 wasn't radical — warrant requirements for archived data, retention limits, restrictions on sharing plate data across state lines. These are baseline accountability measures, the kind of thing you'd expect to pass without much fuss. Instead, it died again, same as the four bills before it, under pressure from police associations and the vendors who profit from keeping the data spigot wide open.

This is the pattern across the country: Flock and similar companies build networks first, normalize them through local police contracts, and only then does anyone ask whether the public consented to being tracked block by block. By the time lawmakers try to impose guardrails, there's already a multi-agency, multi-state data-sharing apparatus that nobody elected and few understand. Opposition from law enforcement groups isn't surprising — unregulated access is simply more convenient than regulated access. But convenience for police isn't the same as safety for the public, and the gap between those two things is exactly what these bills were trying to close.

If you're in California, this isn't abstract — check our camera map to see what's already watching your routes, and use our take-action page to push your own representatives before a sixth attempt quietly goes the way of the first five.