Berkeley city leaders voting on Flock camera contract
The short version: Berkeley's city council is weighing a Flock Safety ALPR contract, putting another Bay Area city at a crossroads over mass license plate surveillance.
Our Take
Berkeley has long branded itself a privacy-conscious city, so it's telling that its leaders are even entertaining a Flock Safety contract. KRON4's Joey Horta lays out the basic stakes: another city council weighing "public safety" promises against a camera network that logs every car's movements, innocent or not, and feeds that data into a system Flock and local police control far more than residents realize.
These votes tend to follow a script. Officials cite a few sympathetic cases, vendors tout clearance-rate numbers that rarely hold up to scrutiny, and the actual policy questions — data retention, outside agency access, audit trails, ICE and out-of-state sharing — get glossed over in the rush to approve. Berkeley residents deserve a real public accounting of where that data goes and who can pull it, not just a council vote.
If you're in Berkeley or anywhere nearby, now's the time to find out if Flock is already watching your street and show up before the contract is locked in. Check our camera map to see what's nearby, and visit our take-action page for ways to push back before the ink dries.
This is DeFlock The USA’s original commentary. The video above is the work of KRON 4, published on YouTube — full credit to the creator.