Stop Flock Cameras in Your Town: Free Action Kit

Step 1: Find out what your town has

Search your police department in the Atlas of Surveillance and check the camera map. Then find the money: search your city's budget documents and council minutes for "Flock", "ALPR", or "license plate". Contracts usually renew annually, and the renewal date is your deadline and your opportunity.

Step 2: Request the records

Every state has a public-records law that lets you request your town's Flock contract and, crucially, its audit logs, which show who searched the cameras and why. Send this letter to your city clerk or police department's records division. It takes five minutes.

To the Records Officer:

Under [your state's public records act], I request the following records:

1. All current contracts, agreements, and invoices between [city/agency] and Flock Safety, Inc., including any addenda or renewal terms.

2. All policies governing the use of automated license plate readers (ALPRs) by [agency], including data retention and sharing policies.

3. Audit logs or search logs of the Flock system for the past 12 months, including the stated reason for each search and the agency of the requesting user, with personal identifiers redacted as required.

4. A list of outside agencies with which [agency] shares ALPR data or search access.

I request these records in electronic format. If any portion is withheld, please cite the specific exemption and release the remainder. Please confirm receipt of this request.

Thank you,
[Your name]
[City] resident

Step 3: Show up and speak

Camera contracts pass quietly when nobody comments. Public comment is usually three minutes; this script fits with time to spare. Adapt it, or just read it.

My name is [name] and I live in [neighborhood]. I'm asking the council to vote no on renewing our contract with Flock Safety.

These cameras photograph every driver in [city], not suspects: every school run, medical appointment, and church visit, kept in a database for a month and searchable by thousands of outside agencies we don't control.

Officers in other cities have been fired and charged for using this exact system to track ex-partners. Audit logs elsewhere have shown searches run for out-of-state agencies for things that are legal here. Once our data is in the network, our rules don't protect us.

We pay roughly $3,000 per camera every year for this. I'd ask each council member: can you tell residents specifically what that spending has produced here, and who has searched our cameras this year? If the answer isn't public, that alone is reason to vote no.

Please let the contract lapse, and put any future surveillance purchase in front of the public first. Thank you.

Step 4: Bring the receipts

Talking points that hold up, with sources your council can verify:

Everyone is recorded. ALPRs photograph every passing car and keep the records regardless of suspicion. See EFF's ALPR explainer.
Misuse is documented, not hypothetical. Officers in multiple states have lost their jobs or been charged over Flock searches targeting people they knew. Our news feed carries the latest cases.
Local rules don't survive the network. Sharing settings let outside agencies search local cameras; state audits have caught searches that violated state law.
The costs recur forever. Cameras are leased, roughly $3,000 each per year, and the contract auto-renews unless the council acts.
Cities have said no. Austin, TX let its contract lapse after resident pushback, and Evanston, IL voted to end its program. Nothing bad happened to either city.

Step 5: Don't do it alone

Find the people already working on this. The Electronic Frontier Alliance lists local digital-rights groups by region, and your state ACLU affiliate may already have a model surveillance ordinance for your council. One prepared speaker changes a meeting; five change the vote.

The one-pager

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