Flock NO! End warrantless Flock safety camera surveillance in California
The Issue
Statement of Purpose
We, the undersigned residents of California, petition this body to terminate its contract with Flock Safety and permanently remove all automated license plate reader (ALPR) cameras from our community.
Flock Safety cameras were installed in our community [without a public vote / without adequate public notice / without meaningful opportunity for resident input — edit to fit your local facts]. Residents were not asked whether they consent to having their daily movements — where they work, worship, seek medical care, attend protests, or visit family — logged, stored, and shared with outside agencies. As detailed below, California already has a law meant to prevent exactly this kind of misuse, and it has repeatedly failed to stop it. We are not asking for another audit or another policy revision. We are asking for these cameras to come down.
Background: What These Cameras Do
Flock’s pole-mounted cameras use AI-powered optical character recognition to capture the license plate, location, time, and vehicle characteristics — including make, color, roof racks, and bumper stickers — of every vehicle that passes, regardless of whether the driver is suspected of any wrongdoing. This data is uploaded to a searchable, centralized database that can be queried not only by local police but, in many documented cases, by outside law enforcement agencies across the country.
This is not a hypothetical concern. It is happening now, in California, in city after city:
• In October 2025, California Attorney General Rob Bonta sued the City of El Cajon after its police department refused — despite repeated warnings — to stop sharing ALPR data with law enforcement agencies in more than two dozen other states, including states with starkly different laws on immigration and reproductive healthcare.
• In January 2026, an audit by the Mountain View Police Department discovered that federal agencies had been accessing data from one of its Flock cameras for several months without the department’s knowledge, after a “nationwide” sharing setting was mistakenly left on instead of “statewide.” In February 2026, following public pressure, Mountain View’s police chief announced the department would immediately discontinue use of Flock ALPR cameras entirely.
• A statewide class action filed in San Francisco Superior Court in February 2026 (Gibbs Mura / Milberg PLLC) alleges Flock Safety facilitated the unlawful sharing of millions of Californians’ location data with out-of-state and federal agencies, in violation of state privacy law.
• In 2021, EFF and California ACLU affiliates successfully sued the Marin County Sheriff for sending ALPR data to federal agencies including ICE and CBP — a case that settled in the plaintiffs’ favor and helped establish that this kind of sharing is unlawful under state law.
• After EFF successfully lobbied for a legislatively-directed review, the California State Auditor’s 2020 report found that the majority of state law enforcement agencies using ALPR technology were not in compliance with existing privacy-policy requirements.
• Nationwide, at least 82 Flock contracts have been terminated across 28 states since 2021, as residents and elected officials in Santa Cruz, Mountain View, El Cerrito, and dozens of other California and out-of-state communities concluded the surveillance risk outweighed the promised benefit.
These are not isolated incidents. They are the predictable result of a nationwide, privately operated surveillance network with default settings and vendor architecture that make violating California law easy — and enforcement that has so far depended on the state having to sue individual cities one at a time. In every case where a city has actually stopped the harm, it has done so the same way: by ending the program, not by revising it.
Why This Violates Our Rights
1. Lack of Consent
No resident of California was asked to consent to having their movements tracked. Driving to work, to a doctor’s appointment, to church, or to a political rally is not an act that implies consent to government surveillance. Multiple lawsuits nationwide now allege exactly this: that residents were surveilled without consent, without notice, and without any meaningful way to opt out.
2. Fourth Amendment and State Constitutional Concerns
The U.S. Supreme Court held in Carpenter v. United States (2018) that accessing even seven days of historical cell-site location data constitutes a Fourth Amendment “search,” because of how detailed and effortlessly compiled that data is. This is the foundation of the “mosaic theory”: individual observations that are harmless in isolation can become a constitutionally significant invasion of privacy once aggregated. A citywide network of ALPR cameras, running continuously, creates exactly this kind of mosaic — reconstructing where a person sleeps, worships, seeks medical treatment, and organizes politically.
Courts are actively split on this question. Litigation in Boulder, Colorado argues that a citywide camera network cataloging residents’ movements without a warrant violates protections under the Colorado Constitution, with plaintiffs’ counsel noting that the overwhelming majority of people captured by these systems have no connection to any crime under investigation. By contrast, courts in Norfolk, Virginia and Washington State have upheld more limited deployments — but even the Norfolk ruling warned that future expansion of scope or retention could cross a constitutional line. We should not wait for our community to become the test case.
3. Unauthorized Data Sharing in Direct Violation of State Law
California’s ALPR Privacy Act (Senate Bill 34, 2015; codified at Civil Code §§ 1798.90.5–1798.90.55) requires every ALPR operator and end-user to publish a written usage and privacy policy consistent with residents’ privacy and civil liberties, and separately provides, at Civil Code § 1798.90.55(b), that a public agency “shall not sell, share, or transfer ALPR information, except to another public agency, and only as otherwise permitted by law.” California’s Values Act (SB 54) separately restricts the use of ALPR databases for immigration enforcement. The California Department of Justice issued formal bulletins in October 2023 reaffirming that “public agency” under SB 34 does not include out-of-state or federal law enforcement — meaning there is no ambiguity left for a city to hide behind. Despite this, the Attorney General has had to sue at least one California city (El Cajon) for continuing to share data with law enforcement agencies in over two dozen other states; the San Diego Police Department was separately found to be sharing data with federal agencies including ICE; and Mountain View discovered federal agencies had accessed its camera data through a misconfigured sharing setting. We are entitled to know, in writing, whether our own city is currently compliant — and we should not have to wait for the Attorney General to find out for us.
4. No Meaningful Retention Limits or Oversight
SB 34 requires a written retention policy, but does not itself impose a statewide numeric cap — some California departments retain data for as little as 30 days, while others retain it far longer or have never published a clear policy at all. [Insert your city’s current retention policy here, or note if none has ever been made public.] Without a strict, independently audited retention limit and public reporting requirement, ALPR data can accumulate into a permanent movement history of every resident, with no way for the public to verify how long it is actually kept or who has queried it.
5. Private Right of Action Already Exists — and Real Money Is on the Line
Under Civil Code § 1798.90.54, any Californian harmed by a violation of the ALPR Privacy Act — including unauthorized access, use, or breach of security of ALPR information — may bring a civil action and recover actual damages of no less than $2,500 per violation, plus punitive damages upon proof of willful or reckless disregard of the law, and reasonable attorney’s fees. A 2026 California appellate ruling (Bartholomew v. Parking Concepts) confirmed that failing to publish a legally required usage and privacy policy is itself compensable harm under this statute — even without proof that data was ever misused or shared. This is not a theoretical protection: it is real, quantifiable legal exposure our city may already be carrying if it has not published and maintained the privacy policy SB 34 requires.
6. Disparate Impact
Independent research on ALPR deployment patterns elsewhere in the country has found that camera placement can result in more intensive surveillance of some communities of color compared to others. Given California’s stated commitments to equity in policing, any surveillance program adopted without public input and without an equity review risks compounding existing inequities in how policing is applied here as well.
Our Demands
We call on California legislators to:
1. Immediately suspend the operation of all Flock Safety (or equivalent ALPR) cameras within [City/County Name] pending a full public compliance review.
2. Publish an independent audit confirming whether [City/County Name] has ever shared ALPR data with any out-of-state or federal agency, in compliance with the California Attorney General’s October 2023 guidance on SB 34 — and make the results public regardless of outcome.
3. Require a public vote or formal council approval before any future contract renewal, expansion, or new surveillance technology contract — with meaningful advance notice and opportunity for public comment, as SB 34 already requires for the underlying usage policy.
4. Mandate a warrant requirement before any ALPR data is accessed for anything beyond an active, specific felony investigation, going beyond SB 34’s existing (and often unenforced) minimums.
5. Confirm in writing and enforce a strict prohibition on sharing data with any out-of-state or federal agency, consistent with Civil Code § 1798.90.55(b) and SB 54, and require public, auditable logs of every database query, including the requesting agency and stated reason — modeled on the practice of publishing an Annual Surveillance Report, as San Diego now does.
6. Impose a strict data retention limit (e.g., 7–30 days) with automatic deletion, and end any current practice of indefinite or unaudited retention.
7. Establish independent civilian oversight of any surveillance technology program, with regular public reporting on usage, misuse, and data-sharing incidents.
8. Publish a full public accounting of camera locations, current data-sharing agreements, and every outside agency that has queried Californias camera network to date.
Conclusion
Public safety and constitutional freedom are not opposites — but a surveillance system installed without our consent, operating without meaningful limits, and quietly opened to outside agencies is not the balance our community was promised. We ask this body to act now, before the state of California becomes another cautionary example rather than a model of responsible governance.
Sources referenced in this petition (for further reading / verification)
• California Attorney General Rob Bonta, press release and lawsuit against City of El Cajon, October 3, 2025 (oag.ca.gov)
• California Attorney General’s October 2023 legal bulletins on SB 34 and SB 54 (oag.ca.gov)
• California Senate Bill 34 (2015), ALPR Privacy Act — Civil Code §§ 1798.90.5–1798.90.55
• Civil Code § 1798.90.55(b) (prohibition on sharing ALPR data outside public agencies)
• Civil Code § 1798.90.54 (private right of action, statutory damages)
• California Senate Bill 54, the California Values Act
• Bartholomew v. Parking Concepts, Inc., No. A171546 (Cal. Ct. App., 1st Dist., Div. 5, Feb. 5, 2026), certified for partial publication (usage/privacy policy and cognizable harm under the ALPR Law)
• Gibbs Mura / Milberg PLLC class action, San Francisco Superior Court, filed February 2026
• Lagleva v. Marin County Sheriff, EFF/ACLU lawsuit and settlement, 2021
• California State Auditor report on ALPR compliance, 2020
• KPBS reporting on El Cajon Police Department and SB 34 dispute, August 2025
• Elk Grove Citizen reporting on Mountain View Flock audit, April 2026
• ACLU “Fight Creepy ALPR Cameras” campaign tracker, Mountain View entry, February 2026
• Carpenter v. United States, 585 U.S. 296 (2018)
• Government Technology, “Why Flock Safety Finds Itself in a Surveillance Backlash” (82 contract terminations figure, citing San Francisco Standard reporting)
• Electronic Frontier Foundation, “Victory! California DOJ Declares Out-of-State Sharing of License Plate Data Unlawful”
“May all be freed from states of bondage,
May they be possessed of wisdom, faith, and love.
With perfect sustenance and conduct,
May they always have a remembrance of their former lives.”
Sovereign Beings
175
The Issue
Statement of Purpose
We, the undersigned residents of California, petition this body to terminate its contract with Flock Safety and permanently remove all automated license plate reader (ALPR) cameras from our community.
Flock Safety cameras were installed in our community [without a public vote / without adequate public notice / without meaningful opportunity for resident input — edit to fit your local facts]. Residents were not asked whether they consent to having their daily movements — where they work, worship, seek medical care, attend protests, or visit family — logged, stored, and shared with outside agencies. As detailed below, California already has a law meant to prevent exactly this kind of misuse, and it has repeatedly failed to stop it. We are not asking for another audit or another policy revision. We are asking for these cameras to come down.
Background: What These Cameras Do
Flock’s pole-mounted cameras use AI-powered optical character recognition to capture the license plate, location, time, and vehicle characteristics — including make, color, roof racks, and bumper stickers — of every vehicle that passes, regardless of whether the driver is suspected of any wrongdoing. This data is uploaded to a searchable, centralized database that can be queried not only by local police but, in many documented cases, by outside law enforcement agencies across the country.
This is not a hypothetical concern. It is happening now, in California, in city after city:
• In October 2025, California Attorney General Rob Bonta sued the City of El Cajon after its police department refused — despite repeated warnings — to stop sharing ALPR data with law enforcement agencies in more than two dozen other states, including states with starkly different laws on immigration and reproductive healthcare.
• In January 2026, an audit by the Mountain View Police Department discovered that federal agencies had been accessing data from one of its Flock cameras for several months without the department’s knowledge, after a “nationwide” sharing setting was mistakenly left on instead of “statewide.” In February 2026, following public pressure, Mountain View’s police chief announced the department would immediately discontinue use of Flock ALPR cameras entirely.
• A statewide class action filed in San Francisco Superior Court in February 2026 (Gibbs Mura / Milberg PLLC) alleges Flock Safety facilitated the unlawful sharing of millions of Californians’ location data with out-of-state and federal agencies, in violation of state privacy law.
• In 2021, EFF and California ACLU affiliates successfully sued the Marin County Sheriff for sending ALPR data to federal agencies including ICE and CBP — a case that settled in the plaintiffs’ favor and helped establish that this kind of sharing is unlawful under state law.
• After EFF successfully lobbied for a legislatively-directed review, the California State Auditor’s 2020 report found that the majority of state law enforcement agencies using ALPR technology were not in compliance with existing privacy-policy requirements.
• Nationwide, at least 82 Flock contracts have been terminated across 28 states since 2021, as residents and elected officials in Santa Cruz, Mountain View, El Cerrito, and dozens of other California and out-of-state communities concluded the surveillance risk outweighed the promised benefit.
These are not isolated incidents. They are the predictable result of a nationwide, privately operated surveillance network with default settings and vendor architecture that make violating California law easy — and enforcement that has so far depended on the state having to sue individual cities one at a time. In every case where a city has actually stopped the harm, it has done so the same way: by ending the program, not by revising it.
Why This Violates Our Rights
1. Lack of Consent
No resident of California was asked to consent to having their movements tracked. Driving to work, to a doctor’s appointment, to church, or to a political rally is not an act that implies consent to government surveillance. Multiple lawsuits nationwide now allege exactly this: that residents were surveilled without consent, without notice, and without any meaningful way to opt out.
2. Fourth Amendment and State Constitutional Concerns
The U.S. Supreme Court held in Carpenter v. United States (2018) that accessing even seven days of historical cell-site location data constitutes a Fourth Amendment “search,” because of how detailed and effortlessly compiled that data is. This is the foundation of the “mosaic theory”: individual observations that are harmless in isolation can become a constitutionally significant invasion of privacy once aggregated. A citywide network of ALPR cameras, running continuously, creates exactly this kind of mosaic — reconstructing where a person sleeps, worships, seeks medical treatment, and organizes politically.
Courts are actively split on this question. Litigation in Boulder, Colorado argues that a citywide camera network cataloging residents’ movements without a warrant violates protections under the Colorado Constitution, with plaintiffs’ counsel noting that the overwhelming majority of people captured by these systems have no connection to any crime under investigation. By contrast, courts in Norfolk, Virginia and Washington State have upheld more limited deployments — but even the Norfolk ruling warned that future expansion of scope or retention could cross a constitutional line. We should not wait for our community to become the test case.
3. Unauthorized Data Sharing in Direct Violation of State Law
California’s ALPR Privacy Act (Senate Bill 34, 2015; codified at Civil Code §§ 1798.90.5–1798.90.55) requires every ALPR operator and end-user to publish a written usage and privacy policy consistent with residents’ privacy and civil liberties, and separately provides, at Civil Code § 1798.90.55(b), that a public agency “shall not sell, share, or transfer ALPR information, except to another public agency, and only as otherwise permitted by law.” California’s Values Act (SB 54) separately restricts the use of ALPR databases for immigration enforcement. The California Department of Justice issued formal bulletins in October 2023 reaffirming that “public agency” under SB 34 does not include out-of-state or federal law enforcement — meaning there is no ambiguity left for a city to hide behind. Despite this, the Attorney General has had to sue at least one California city (El Cajon) for continuing to share data with law enforcement agencies in over two dozen other states; the San Diego Police Department was separately found to be sharing data with federal agencies including ICE; and Mountain View discovered federal agencies had accessed its camera data through a misconfigured sharing setting. We are entitled to know, in writing, whether our own city is currently compliant — and we should not have to wait for the Attorney General to find out for us.
4. No Meaningful Retention Limits or Oversight
SB 34 requires a written retention policy, but does not itself impose a statewide numeric cap — some California departments retain data for as little as 30 days, while others retain it far longer or have never published a clear policy at all. [Insert your city’s current retention policy here, or note if none has ever been made public.] Without a strict, independently audited retention limit and public reporting requirement, ALPR data can accumulate into a permanent movement history of every resident, with no way for the public to verify how long it is actually kept or who has queried it.
5. Private Right of Action Already Exists — and Real Money Is on the Line
Under Civil Code § 1798.90.54, any Californian harmed by a violation of the ALPR Privacy Act — including unauthorized access, use, or breach of security of ALPR information — may bring a civil action and recover actual damages of no less than $2,500 per violation, plus punitive damages upon proof of willful or reckless disregard of the law, and reasonable attorney’s fees. A 2026 California appellate ruling (Bartholomew v. Parking Concepts) confirmed that failing to publish a legally required usage and privacy policy is itself compensable harm under this statute — even without proof that data was ever misused or shared. This is not a theoretical protection: it is real, quantifiable legal exposure our city may already be carrying if it has not published and maintained the privacy policy SB 34 requires.
6. Disparate Impact
Independent research on ALPR deployment patterns elsewhere in the country has found that camera placement can result in more intensive surveillance of some communities of color compared to others. Given California’s stated commitments to equity in policing, any surveillance program adopted without public input and without an equity review risks compounding existing inequities in how policing is applied here as well.
Our Demands
We call on California legislators to:
1. Immediately suspend the operation of all Flock Safety (or equivalent ALPR) cameras within [City/County Name] pending a full public compliance review.
2. Publish an independent audit confirming whether [City/County Name] has ever shared ALPR data with any out-of-state or federal agency, in compliance with the California Attorney General’s October 2023 guidance on SB 34 — and make the results public regardless of outcome.
3. Require a public vote or formal council approval before any future contract renewal, expansion, or new surveillance technology contract — with meaningful advance notice and opportunity for public comment, as SB 34 already requires for the underlying usage policy.
4. Mandate a warrant requirement before any ALPR data is accessed for anything beyond an active, specific felony investigation, going beyond SB 34’s existing (and often unenforced) minimums.
5. Confirm in writing and enforce a strict prohibition on sharing data with any out-of-state or federal agency, consistent with Civil Code § 1798.90.55(b) and SB 54, and require public, auditable logs of every database query, including the requesting agency and stated reason — modeled on the practice of publishing an Annual Surveillance Report, as San Diego now does.
6. Impose a strict data retention limit (e.g., 7–30 days) with automatic deletion, and end any current practice of indefinite or unaudited retention.
7. Establish independent civilian oversight of any surveillance technology program, with regular public reporting on usage, misuse, and data-sharing incidents.
8. Publish a full public accounting of camera locations, current data-sharing agreements, and every outside agency that has queried Californias camera network to date.
Conclusion
Public safety and constitutional freedom are not opposites — but a surveillance system installed without our consent, operating without meaningful limits, and quietly opened to outside agencies is not the balance our community was promised. We ask this body to act now, before the state of California becomes another cautionary example rather than a model of responsible governance.
Sources referenced in this petition (for further reading / verification)
• California Attorney General Rob Bonta, press release and lawsuit against City of El Cajon, October 3, 2025 (oag.ca.gov)
• California Attorney General’s October 2023 legal bulletins on SB 34 and SB 54 (oag.ca.gov)
• California Senate Bill 34 (2015), ALPR Privacy Act — Civil Code §§ 1798.90.5–1798.90.55
• Civil Code § 1798.90.55(b) (prohibition on sharing ALPR data outside public agencies)
• Civil Code § 1798.90.54 (private right of action, statutory damages)
• California Senate Bill 54, the California Values Act
• Bartholomew v. Parking Concepts, Inc., No. A171546 (Cal. Ct. App., 1st Dist., Div. 5, Feb. 5, 2026), certified for partial publication (usage/privacy policy and cognizable harm under the ALPR Law)
• Gibbs Mura / Milberg PLLC class action, San Francisco Superior Court, filed February 2026
• Lagleva v. Marin County Sheriff, EFF/ACLU lawsuit and settlement, 2021
• California State Auditor report on ALPR compliance, 2020
• KPBS reporting on El Cajon Police Department and SB 34 dispute, August 2025
• Elk Grove Citizen reporting on Mountain View Flock audit, April 2026
• ACLU “Fight Creepy ALPR Cameras” campaign tracker, Mountain View entry, February 2026
• Carpenter v. United States, 585 U.S. 296 (2018)
• Government Technology, “Why Flock Safety Finds Itself in a Surveillance Backlash” (82 contract terminations figure, citing San Francisco Standard reporting)
• Electronic Frontier Foundation, “Victory! California DOJ Declares Out-of-State Sharing of License Plate Data Unlawful”
“May all be freed from states of bondage,
May they be possessed of wisdom, faith, and love.
With perfect sustenance and conduct,
May they always have a remembrance of their former lives.”
Sovereign Beings
The Decision Makers
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Petition created on July 13, 2026