Palo Alto resident asks City Council to stop city-sponsored mass surveillance of residents #deflock

Our Take

Matt Schlegel's public comment cuts right to the thing Flock Safety and its police partners never want to talk about: these cameras don't just watch cars, they watch people. When a plate reader gets pointed at an intersection where residents regularly gather to protest federal immigration enforcement, the surveillance stops being an abstract privacy debate and becomes a direct chilling effect on the right to assemble. Schlegel's framing — that mass ALPR logging may be discouraging neighbors from showing up to exercise their First Amendment rights — is exactly the kind of local, concrete harm that gets lost in Flock's marketing about "solving crime."

This is also a good reminder that these fights are won or lost in city council chambers, not in corporate press releases. One resident standing up and asking for a camera to be covered and a contract to be terminated is a small act, but it's the same mechanism that has gotten Flock systems pulled or paused in other towns. Councils approved these contracts quietly; they can un-approve them just as loudly if enough residents show up and say so.

Credit to Matt Schlegel for putting this on the record in Palo Alto. If you want to see whether a camera like the one he's describing is logging traffic near your own home, meeting spot, or place of worship, check our camera map, and if you're ready to push back locally, our take-action page has the tools to help you do it.