"Get the Flock Out" rally to end camera program in San Diego
The short version: San Diego residents rallied under the banner 'Get the Flock Out,' demanding the city pull the plug on its Flock Safety ALPR program over surveillance and accountability concerns.
Our Take
Credit to NBC 7 San Diego for putting a camera on this one, because rallies like "Get the Flock Out" are exactly how local surveillance fights get won or lost. When residents show up in person to tell a city council that a license-plate reading network crossed a line, that's democracy doing the job the vendor contracts and closed-door briefings were never designed to do. San Diego isn't an outlier here — it's the latest city where people are waking up to the fact that a quiet procurement decision turned their daily commute into a tracked data point.
What makes these systems worth fighting over isn't just the cameras themselves, it's the scale and the silence around them. Flock's pitch is always public safety, but the backend is a nationwide lookup network that can let one department's plate-read ping dozens of other agencies, often with little public oversight of who's searching, why, or how long the data sticks around. That's the gap organizers in San Diego are pointing at, and it's the same gap we track city by city on our camera map.
If you want San Diego's momentum to actually change outcomes, don't let it stay a one-day headline. Pull up your own city's footprint, see what's already installed near you, and push your council for the retention limits, audit logs, and public votes that should've happened before the first camera went up. Our take-action page has the templates and talking points to make that happen.
This is DeFlock The USA’s original commentary. The video above is the work of NBC 7 San Diego, published on YouTube — full credit to the creator.