Quick Take
As Watsonville weighs renewing its Flock Safety camera contract, a new coalition is urging local cities to cut ties with the surveillance vendor, citing immigration risks and civil liberties concerns.
In the years since city councils in Watsonville, Santa Cruz and Capitola overwhelmingly supported installing automatic license plate readers in their streets over community concerns, a movement opposing the surveillance technology and its vendor has picked up in cities across the U.S.
Now, ahead of a Watsonville City Council vote on Tuesday to renew the contract for the artificial intelligence-powered cameras, a group has formed to urge elected officials across the county to reconsider their agreements with the vendor, Flock Safety.
Get the Flock Out (GTFO), led in part by former county supervisor candidate Ami Chen Mills, cites recent media reports of law enforcement agencies in California — not in Santa Cruz County — sharing data collected by the cameras with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and Immigration & Customs Enforcement. Outside of California, the company has been criticized for supplying data directly to U.S. Customs and Border Protection.
The cameras, which are set up throughout the cities and at their borders, automatically log license plates and other identifying data on every single car that crosses their field of view. The data is then stored for a month, and can be accessed by law enforcement agencies across the state if given access by the local police department.
Despite California laws forbidding local law enforcement from sharing information with federal immigration agents, the ability for outside agencies to access the data has become an elevated concern as the federal government has used increasingly aggressive tactics in its deportation efforts. Lookout previously reported that the Riverside County Sheriff’s Office is believed to have accessed Flock data on behalf of federal agents.
“We want to end the contracts with Flock. Period,” Chen Mills told Lookout on Thursday. “We are going to make sure that cities start thinking about this because I don’t think they’ve thought about it deeply. The tides have changed in public opinion around these cameras since the presidential election.”
Police departments have defended Flock cameras as a useful tool in identifying stolen vehicles or finding people wanted for serious crimes.
During a city council meeting last month, Watsonville Police Capt. Donny Thul said police had used the city’s 20 cameras 98 times in the previous six months, including for an investigation in which the cameras helped law enforcement track a stabbing suspect from Monterey County who later stabbed a police canine during arrest. In another recent case involving multiple shootings across the county, Flock data helped identify a suspect vehicle and generate evidence for search warrants.
Thul confirmed to the city council that the department cannot share information with agencies outside California, particularly immigration enforcement. He added that two audits this year found no misuse of the system.
Earlier this summer, Santa Cruz Police Chief Bernie Escalante acknowledged that the ability of other police departments to access and share Santa Cruz’s Flock data with federal agents was a weakness in the technology, especially given the climate around immigration enforcement.
“I don’t disagree it is a little bit of an issue with the Flock system,” Escalante said in July. “And obviously we signed onto this thing before this administration took a stance on immigration the way that they have, so this sort of nuance was not an issue when we were trying to purchase the cameras and get into a contract.”
Chen Mills said her group is still building its campaign, but she expects it to focus on public education and attending city council meetings to urge elected officials to at least pause agreements with Flock, as the Denver City Council did in Colorado earlier this year.
Lourdes Barraza, a member of GTFO focused on Watsonville, said informing the public about the cameras will be key. A South County resident for more than 50 years, Barraza considers herself an engaged and active citizen, but only found out about Flock cameras “a month and a half ago.” The Watsonville City Council voted to bring the cameras into the city in 2023.
“The public is just becoming aware of this now,” Barraza said. “The way it was sold to the cities focused on the good things it could do. But I don’t think the good outweighs the bad. In general, we’re getting too comfortable with the surveillance state. We shouldn’t normalize that.”
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