Across Sacramento County, Automated License Plate Recognition (ALPR) cameras manufactured by Flock Safety track hundreds of thousands of law-abiding drivers daily. Mounted on arterial roadways, neighborhood intersections, and retail plazas, these AI-enabled cameras do far more than spot stolen vehicles. They record make, model, color, identifying marks, and precise timestamps, building searchable location histories of residents who have committed no crime.  

This creates a persistent, automated dragnet that turns ordinary travel into a trackable event, eroding constitutional protections under the Fourth Amendment and the California Constitution.

Why Sacramento Is at Serious Risk

Unlawful Data Sharing: A Sacramento County Grand Jury investigation confirmed that local law enforcement agencies violated California law (SB 34) by sharing license plate records with out-of-state entities. In an environment where other states penalize reproductive healthcare and gender-affirming services, exporting driver movements outside California directly imperils residents and visitors seeking medical care.  

Warrantless Movement Tracking: Flock networks allow police and private subscribers to query historical vehicular routes across residential corridors, places of worship, healthcare centers, and civic protests without obtaining a judicial warrant.

Documented False Positives: ALPR error rates and plate misreads frequently trigger high-risk, guns-drawn felony stops of innocent drivers, generating severe public safety risks rather than preventing crime.

Privatized Public Infrastructure: Flock has systematically privatized municipal surveillance by pairing local government databases with private homeowner associations (HOAs) and commercial centers, bypassing traditional public scrutiny and democratic review.  

Our Demands to Sacramento Officials

We urge the Sacramento County Board of Supervisors, the Sacramento City Council, and local law enforcement leadership to:

Terminate all public contracts with Flock Safety and halt access to privatized camera feeds.

Ban automated mass surveillance on public roadways and municipal rights-of-way.

Purge all historical non-evidentiary vehicle logs stored in regional data-sharing platforms.

Pass a strict Surveillance Transparency Ordinance requiring comprehensive community input and explicit council approval before any surveillance hardware is funded or deployed.

Sacramento roads should belong to the community, not a private surveillance monopoly. Sign this petition to protect our civil liberties and demand our leaders deflock Sacramento.

To review how local officials publicly justify this surveillance network, watch this segment covering how the Sacramento sheriff defends Flock cameras amid privacy debate, which outlines the agency's rationale and the friction with privacy advocates.  

Recent stories:

San Jose Police officer fired after using flock data for personal use

https://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/san-jose-police-fired-flock-camera/4141719/

How flock became public enemy #1

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/18/opinion/flock-cameras-ai-privacy.html