Auburn Cancelled Its Flock Contract - And Never Voted To Start It #Shorts
The short version: A Flock U short spotlights Auburn killing its Flock Safety contract after reportedly adopting ALPR surveillance without ever holding a public vote.
Our Take
Credit to Flock U for flagging a pattern we see over and over: a city rolls out automated license plate readers quietly, sometimes through a city manager's signature or a no-bid renewal, and only later does anyone ask whether elected officials actually approved it. Auburn reportedly never held a vote to start its Flock contract — and now it's cancelling that contract. That sequence alone should bother anyone who cares about how surveillance infrastructure gets deployed in their town.
This isn't just a procedural footnote. ALPR networks capture and store the comings and goings of every driver, not just suspects, and that kind of dragnet deserves an actual public debate — council meetings, public comment, a recorded vote — before cameras go up on utility poles. When that step gets skipped, residents lose the one real chance they have to weigh in before the data pipes are already flowing to police departments and, in many cases, other agencies nationwide.
If you want to know whether your own city has Flock cameras and how they got there, check our map, and if your council never took a public vote, that's exactly the kind of thing worth raising at the next meeting. Start with our take-action page and see where your local cameras sit on the map.
This is DeFlock The USA’s original commentary. The video above is the work of Flock U, published on YouTube — full credit to the creator.