Residents demand City of Elk Grove cancel Flock, ALPR surveillance camera contracts

Our Take

Forty-five minutes of public comment, twenty-two speakers, one message: rip the cameras out. That's not a fringe turnout — that's a community that did its homework and showed up en masse to tell the Elk Grove City Council that automated license plate readers don't belong on their streets. Credit to ElkGroveNews for sitting through the whole thing and getting it on record, and credit to the local DeFlock chapter for organizing residents instead of letting this slide through on a consent agenda nobody reads.

What's notable here is that speakers didn't just single out Flock Safety by name — plenty of them made clear this is bigger than one vendor. That's the right instinct. Whether it's Flock, Motorola, or some other outfit selling networked cameras to track every car that passes a given point, the underlying problem is the same: a permanent, searchable record of where you drive, built without a warrant, often shared across agency lines and state borders with little public oversight. Once that data exists, it gets used for far more than the narrow case it was sold on.

Elk Grove isn't unique — this same fight is playing out in city council chambers across the country as residents discover the cameras their police departments quietly signed contracts for. If you want to see how dense the coverage is in your own area, check our camera map, and if you're ready to push back the way Elk Grove residents just did, our take-action page has the tools to get started.