DA warns of more 'victims who don't get justice' after Monterey County cuts FLOCK cameras
The short version: A Monterey County budget cut to Flock camera funding has the DA warning of future 'victims,' but KSBW's report leaves the privacy tradeoffs unexamined.
Our Take
Credit to KSBW Action News 8 for covering the fallout after Monterey County trimmed its Flock Safety contract — but notice the frame: a DA warning about future 'victims who don't get justice' is doing a lot of work here, with almost no mention of what residents gave up to have a few hundred license plates scanned a day. That's the standard playbook anytime a jurisdiction even pumps the brakes on ALPR spending — invoke unsolved crimes, skip the audit of who accessed the data, how long it sat on a server, or whether it actually closed cases versus just generating leads that went nowhere.
Budget cuts are one of the only levers communities have against a surveillance system that was often approved with little public debate in the first place. If Monterey County residents are now hearing a law enforcement official argue for restoring the cameras, that's exactly the moment to ask for the actual numbers: clearance rates before and after Flock, how many searches were run, and who flagged them. Fear of hypothetical victims shouldn't be enough to greenlight a dragnet that logs the comings and goings of everyone, not just suspects.
If you want to see whether your own neighborhood has these cameras watching every car that passes, check our camera map, and if you'd rather your county have this debate before signing a renewal rather than after, our take-action page has the tools to get involved.
This is DeFlock The USA’s original commentary. The video above is the work of KSBW Action News 8, published on YouTube — full credit to the creator.