Sights and sounds from a protest against Flock cameras in San Diego
The short version: CBS 8 San Diego captured dozens marching from the federal building to City Hall, pushing back on the city's Flock ALPR network.
Our Take
Credit to CBS 8 San Diego for getting boots-on-the-ground footage of this one. When people are willing to march from a federal building to City Hall over a camera system, that's a signal worth paying attention to. San Diego isn't an outlier — it's part of a pattern we're tracking all over the country, where communities wake up to a surveillance network installed with little public debate and even less accountability for how the data gets used, shared, or retained.
Flock's pitch is always the same: stolen cars, missing persons, public safety. What rarely gets a press release is who else can query that data — ICE, out-of-state police, private actors with the right access — and for how long. A march like this is really a demand for the basic democratic process that got skipped the first time around: public hearings, retention limits, audit trails, and a real off-ramp if the promises don't pan out.
If you want to see whether your own neighborhood has been wired up without a public conversation, check our camera map, and if you're ready to push back the way San Diego residents are, our take-action page has concrete steps for your city council meeting.
This is DeFlock The USA’s original commentary. The video above is the work of CBS 8 San Diego, published on YouTube — full credit to the creator.