City of Oak Park Heights, Special Election for City Council Member at Large, 09.19.2026
The short version: A League of Women Voters forum lets Oak Park Heights voters grill council candidate Mark Swenson — exactly the kind of local accountability moment surveillance decisions hinge on.
Our Take
Credit to the League of Women Voters of White Bear Lake Area for doing the unglamorous but essential work of putting a city council candidate in front of voters and letting them ask the questions. Special elections like this one in Oak Park Heights rarely get statewide attention, but city councils are exactly where decisions about ALPR contracts, Flock Safety deployments, and data-sharing agreements with other jurisdictions get made — often with little public scrutiny until the cameras are already bolted to the poles.
We don't know from this forum whether license plate readers came up directly, and we're not going to pretend otherwise. But that's the point: these are the venues where residents should be pressing candidates like Mark Swenson on where he stands on surveillance tech, who gets access to the data, and whether the public gets a say before new cameras go in. If your city hasn't had that conversation yet, a candidate forum is the perfect place to start it.
If you're in Oak Park Heights or anywhere else in Minnesota, check our map to see what's already watching your streets, and head to our take-action page for tools to bring this up with your own local officials before the next election rolls around.
This is DeFlock The USA’s original commentary. The video above is the work of League of Women Voters of White Bear Lake Area, published on YouTube — full credit to the creator.