Affordability not mass surveillance cameras is the solution to public safety - Reem Suleiman

Our Take

At Indivisible Palo Alto Plus's "Who's Watching?" forum, Matt Schlegel's channel captured Reem Suleiman, Senior Campaigns Director at Fight for the Future, making a point we hear too rarely from city councils: that public safety is a budget and services problem, not a camera-coverage problem. Her argument cuts against the standard Flock Safety sales pitch, which treats every unsolved crime as proof that the answer is simply more ALPR cameras bolted to more intersections.

This is the core tension we track every day. Flock's network has expanded into thousands of communities on the promise of safety, while the actual drivers of crime — housing instability, lack of mental health care, economic precarity — go underfunded. Meanwhile, the data these cameras generate sits in databases that can be queried by any agency with access, shared across jurisdictions, and used well beyond the narrow cases that got the systems approved in the first place. Affordability and investment in people don't carry those risks.

If your city council is debating a Flock contract, take Suleiman's framing into that meeting: ask what the money could do for housing, outreach, and services instead. Check whether your neighborhood already hosts a reader on our camera map, and find concrete steps to push back at take action.