#flock #alpr #visalia My comments at the City Council meeting. 9/8/26

Our Take

Credit to Jim Reeves for doing the unglamorous work of showing up to a city council meeting and putting his concerns about Flock Safety's license plate readers on the public record. Whatever specifics he raised, the act itself matters: these surveillance contracts almost always get approved in low-attendance meetings where nobody from the public pushes back, and departments count on that silence to keep the cameras humming with zero oversight.

Visalia is just the latest city working through this fight, and it's a familiar script — a police department pitches ALPRs as a simple tool for stolen cars and wanted persons, while the actual footprint of blanket location tracking on every driver, guilty or not, doesn't get mentioned until a resident like Reeves brings it up directly to the council. Public comment is one of the few levers citizens have before contracts get signed and cameras start recording plates by the millions.

If your own city is quietly rolling out Flock cameras, don't wait for someone else to speak up at the meeting. Check our map to see what's already been deployed near you, and use our take-action resources to figure out how to raise these questions with your own council before the vote happens.