speaking out against Axon/Flock/ALPRs at my city's council meeting

Our Take

Credit to Bruce Starlove for doing the unglamorous work of showing up to a city council meeting and saying the quiet part loud: these camera networks don't get installed because residents demand them, they get installed because a vendor sales rep and a police chief put a slide deck in front of people who've never had to think hard about automated license plate readers before. Most of these contracts sail through on a consent agenda with zero public debate. The fact that someone stood up and forced the issue into the record is itself the story.

What makes ALPR fights different from other surveillance debates is that the infrastructure is physical and local — it's a camera on a pole in your district, paid for with your tax dollars, feeding a database that your police department doesn't fully control once Flock or Axon's network-sharing features kick in. That's exactly the kind of decision that should get contested in a council chamber, not rubber-stamped between a budget item and a proclamation about Small Business Week. If your town has cameras like this, you can check our camera map to see what's already been deployed near you.

If you're in a city that's considering a Flock contract, or already has one, this video is a reminder that public comment periods are one of the few levers residents still have before these systems become permanent. We've got resources on how to organize that kind of pushback on our take-action page — because once the cameras go up, getting them taken down is a much harder fight than stopping them in the first place.