This is a petition for the  residents and community members of Sonoma to call on the Sonoma City Council to immediately cancel the city's contract with Flock Safety, turn off all active automated license plate reader (ALPR) camera feeds, and remove or cover the existing surveillance hardware across our city.

Sonoma's $50,000 annual contract with Flock Safety exposes our city to severe legal liabilities, jeopardizes our sanctuary policies, and hands sensitive location data over to a company with a documented history of misconduct.

Why This Matters
1. Flock Violates California Privacy Laws Under California Senate Bill 34 (SB 34), law enforcement agencies are explicitly prohibited from sharing ALPR data with out-of-state or federal entities. Independent audits across California—including recent investigations in Mountain View and Santa Cruz—revealed that Flock’s default system settings allowed hundreds of out-of-state agencies to search local driver data without municipal oversight. This pattern led Mountain View’s Deputy Chief to immediately cancel their contract. Sonoma must not partner with a vendor that puts our city at constant legal risk.

2. It Threatens Our Sanctuary Policies and Civil Liberties Mass location tracking by a private corporation creates a digital dragnet that monitors law-abiding neighbors every time they drive to the grocery store, school, or church. This indiscriminate surveillance directly harms our immigrant, agricultural, and working-class communities, while opening side-doors for federal agencies (like ICE) to bypass local sanctuary protections. Furthermore, out-of-state agencies can leverage this network to track individuals seeking reproductive or gender-affirming healthcare.

3. Flock Safety Has Proven It Cannot Be Trusted Investigative reports and documentation compiled by the ACLU reveal a pattern of deceptive practices and abuse:

Misleading Local Officials: When officials in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, caught Flock concealing automated "heat map" tracking features, the Council halted their contract, with the Deputy Mayor questioning how a city can govern when a vendor tells "untruths."
Unpermitted Data Sharing: Flock’s default network settings regularly bypass state privacy protections without the knowledge of local police.
Discriminatory Surveillance: Audit logs from Flock systems have revealed instances of officers using system tools to conduct discriminatory searches based on racial and ethnic profiling without specifying a crime.
Our Demand to the City Council
Santa Cruz, Mountain View, and Santa Clara County have already taken action to turn off or cancel their Flock surveillance systems. Sonoma must follow suit.

Selling out our community's fundamental right to privacy for around $50,000 a year to an unverified private equity-backed corporation is unacceptable. We urge the City Council to terminate the Flock Safety contract, disable the feeds, and clear our roads of these cameras immediately.

Sign this petition to tell the Sonoma City Council: Protect our privacy and end the Flock Safety contract today!