Demand City Officials Cancel Contract with Surveillance Company

The City of Bloomington entered into an agreement with Flock Safety in 2024 with ongoing conversation regarding its services scheduled in 2026. While in a town hall on Jan. 26, Mayor Kerry Thomson claimed the contract would only track license plates, Flock’s collaboration with ICE is well documented. These decisions were made without public input, outside of city council purview, but impact our daily lives, safety, and privacy directly. 

There may still be time to prevent more Flock presence in our community. The City of Bloomington can join the cities of Flagstaff, Austin, Cambridge, Evanston, and Eugene in cancelling their contract with Flock. Sign to tell Mayor Thomson that Flock cannot be trusted to keep our data safe, and Flock has no place in our city. 

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As Care not Cages notes, one of the ways the carceral system expands beyond jail and prison walls is the growth of the surveillance state. The data Flock gathers on citizens has become a major tool in this effort, violating our right to privacy and supporting suppression of our first amendment rights:

• Privacy advocates and researchers like the Electronic Frontier Foundation are concerned this transition turns the network into a "mass surveillance system" that could track protesters and reproductive healthcare seekers, or be misused for stalking and profiling.
• There is no evidence to support Flock’s claims that its technologies reduce crime or improve public safety. There is evidence that they do the opposite: ALPRs misidentify plates up to 10% of the time and increase violent encounters between police and civilians (example, example).
  
  
• ALPR data has been shared with government agencies and is expanding the ways its AI technology turns citizens into suspects. (Read more from the ACLU here.) This is even more concerning when we consider that police have used Flock to monitor No Kings protests; this demonstrates Flock’s openness to allowing their data to be used to monitor citizens enacting their first amendment rights.