Darth Vader MOCKS Flock Camera Surveillance at City Council Meeting
The short version: A Darth Vader-costumed speaker roasts Flock ALPR surveillance at a city council meeting, proving public pushback is going mainstream — even in a cape.
Our Take
Credit to TheDC Shorts for capturing this one: someone walked into a city council meeting dressed as Darth Vader to mock their local Flock Safety camera program. It's a stunt, sure, but stunts like this land because they cut through the bureaucratic fog that usually surrounds these meetings. When a resident has to put on a costume to get people to pay attention to a network of license plate readers logging everyone's movements, that tells you something about how little scrutiny these systems normally get.
We don't know the exact points raised in the meeting — we're not going to pretend we watched a transcript we didn't — but the broader pattern is familiar to anyone who's tracked Flock's expansion. City councils approve these contracts fast, often with minimal public debate, and residents only find out after the cameras are already up and running. A little theater at a council meeting is sometimes what it takes to force elected officials to actually answer questions about retention policies, data sharing, and who gets access to the footage.
If your town has Flock cameras — or you're not sure — check our map to see what's already been deployed near you, and hit up our take-action page if you want to bring these questions to your own council meeting, cape optional.
This is DeFlock The USA’s original commentary. The video above is the work of TheDC Shorts, published on YouTube — full credit to the creator.