Officer Bryan Morrison Discusses Flock - Auburn, CA City Council Meeting Apr 27th 2026

Our Take

Credit where it's due: Central Sierra Foothills DSA did the unglamorous work of showing up to a city council meeting and filming it, which is exactly how most ALPR rollouts get rubber-stamped in this country — quietly, during a Tuesday night agenda item, with an officer doing the selling and almost nobody in the room doing the pushing back. Auburn, California is a small town, but the playbook is the same one Flock runs everywhere: frame the cameras as a narrow tool for recovering stolen cars, let council members nod along, and skip the part where every plate read becomes a permanent, searchable record of where residents drive, when, and how often.

What's notable here isn't necessarily anything scandalous in Officer Morrison's presentation — it's that this is how surveillance infrastructure actually spreads. Not through some dramatic federal mandate, but through local police departments pitching city councils one small town at a time, with little public scrutiny of retention periods, data-sharing agreements, or who else gets access to that database once it exists. Auburn joining the list means another community's movements are now logged by a private company's network, interoperable with thousands of other jurisdictions' cameras.

If you want to see how far this has already spread, check our camera map to find Flock installations near you, and if Auburn residents want to push back before the cameras go up, our take-action page has concrete steps for showing up at the next meeting instead of just watching the recording after the fact.