Flock cameras still on in El Cerrito, CA despite expired contract
The short version: A resident's video shows El Cerrito's Flock ALPR cameras still recording more than 50 days after the city's contract expired, raising fresh accountability questions.
Our Take
Credit to Courier California and the resident behind @flockoutelcerrito for doing the oversight work that city officials apparently didn't. If the footage holds up, El Cerrito let a surveillance network keep scanning plates, building location histories, and feeding data to who-knows-where without any active legal agreement in place. That's not a clerical hiccup — it's a surveillance system operating in a vacuum of accountability.
This is exactly the pattern we track: cities sign Flock contracts with promises of transparency and audit trails, then the paperwork lapses and the cameras just... keep running. Nobody pulls the plug because nobody's watching closely enough, and the public is left to do the forensic work themselves. When a resident has to prove a city's own contract expired, something has badly broken down in who's actually in control of the infrastructure — the city, or the vendor.
Check our camera map to see what's deployed near you, and if your town has a Flock contract coming up for renewal — or already expired — use our take-action resources to demand real answers before the cameras stay on by default.
This is DeFlock The USA’s original commentary. The video above is the work of Courier California, published on YouTube — full credit to the creator.