We, the undersigned residents and supporters of the Winfield, KS community, call upon the City of Winfield to remove Flock Safety automated license plate reader cameras from our community and discontinue the City's participation in the Flock surveillance network.

Flock cameras automatically photograph vehicles traveling through our community, recording license plates, vehicle characteristics, locations, dates, and times and placing that information into a searchable database.

We believe this represents an unnecessary expansion of government surveillance.

People should be able to drive to work, take their children to school, visit friends and family, attend church, seek medical care, participate in political activity, or simply travel through their community without their movements being routinely recorded and entered into a law-enforcement-accessible database.

This is not a partisan issue.

Whether someone is conservative, liberal, libertarian, progressive, or none of the above, we should all be concerned about creating surveillance infrastructure capable of tracking the movements of ordinary people who are suspected of no crime.

A free society should require the government to have a reason to investigate someone before tracking their movements - not collect everyone's movements first in case that information becomes useful later.

Once surveillance infrastructure is established, it can also be expanded, interconnected, and repurposed. Policies change. Administrations change. Technology changes. Databases grow.

We, the People of Winfield, KS, therefore call upon the City of Winfield and the Winfield Police Department to:

1. Remove existing Flock Safety automated license plate reader cameras operating on behalf of the City.
2. End or decline to renew contracts or agreements with Flock Safety for automated license plate reader surveillance.
3. Discontinue participation in networks that allow routine collection and searching of vehicle-location information through Flock cameras.
4. Require meaningful public discussion and approval before adopting similar mass-surveillance technology in the future.

Effective public safety does not require putting an entire community under surveillance.

It's time to Deflock Winfield, KS

Brenda Butters

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