Palo Altans want the city to remove Flock cameras! #GetTheFlockOut #FlockOut #FlockOff #GTFO

Our Take

Credit to Matt Schlegel for getting boots-on-the-ground footage of this. It's one thing to read about ALPR pushback in a council meeting agenda packet; it's another to watch a crowd of regular Palo Alto residents stand outside City Hall and chant in unison that they want these cameras gone. That kind of visible, organized frustration doesn't happen over nothing — it happens when people realize their daily movements are being logged by a private company's network without a real public debate about whether that tradeoff was ever worth it.

What's notable here is that this isn't a fringe objection. Palo Alto is a city that generally trusts its local government and tends toward process-heavy civic engagement, so a rally with a chant catchy enough to have its own hashtag suggests the ALPR issue has broken through to people who don't normally show up to protest anything. That's the same pattern we've tracked in other cities: residents find out after the fact that Flock boxes went up, learn how the data can be queried and shared, and decide quietly living with it isn't an option.

If you're in Palo Alto or anywhere else wondering whether your city has already installed these cameras, check our camera map to see what's nearby, and if you want to push back the way these residents are, our take-action page has concrete steps for getting it in front of your own council.