Batman warns Palo Alto that Flock shares data with ICE #flockoff #deflock #abolishICE

Our Take

Credit to Matt Schlegel for capturing this moment of genuinely weird-but-effective civic theater. Showing up to a sleepy city council study session dressed as Batman is a gimmick, sure, but the warning underneath the costume is dead serious: once a city flips on Flock's network of plate readers, it loses meaningful control over who eventually sees that data. Local police departments have repeatedly said one thing about data sharing and then been caught doing another, and the pattern of ALPR records flowing to federal immigration enforcement is well documented enough that "it can't happen here" isn't a credible answer anymore.

Palo Alto likes to think of itself as a privacy-conscious town, which is exactly why study sessions like this matter. These are the moments before a contract gets signed, before the cameras go up on street corners, when public pressure can still change the outcome. A guy in a cowl forces people to pay attention in a way that a dry public-comment speech often doesn't, and that's a legitimate tactic in a fight that usually gets buried in city council agendas nobody reads.

If you want to know whether your own city already has these cameras watching your commute, check our map, and if you'd rather stop one before it goes up, our take-action page has the tools to make noise at your own council meeting — cape optional.