> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://guerrilla.news/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # 23 Cities Said No to Flock Safety. Then the State Made It Illegal to Ask What the Cameras Captured. - URL: https://guerrilla.news/23-cities-said-no-to-flock-safety-then-the-state-made-it-illegal-to-ask-what-the-cameras-captured/ - Published: 2026-08-09T17:08:19.000Z - Updated: 2026-10-01T03:26:59.000Z - Description: Denver called Flock a 'bad actor.' Evanston covered the cameras with plastic. Oshkosh reversed a contract in 24 hours. Then a Washington citizen won the right to see his data, and the legislature passed a law to make sure nobody could ever do it again. - Author: Ronald E. Durbin II, J.D. - Tags: Surveillance, Civil Rights, Police Accountability, Government Transparency, Flock Safety, #flock-series *By Ron Durbin | Guerrilla News* The letter from the Denver City Council did not use diplomatic language. After independent audits discovered that over 1,400 immigration-related searches had been conducted on the city's Flock Safety cameras, the council drafted a formal communication citing the company's "disregard for honesty and accountability" as grounds for terminating the contract. The Mayor had attempted to unilaterally push through a renewal. The council called it a backroom deal with a bad actor. The cameras came down. Denver was not alone. Across the United States, at least 23 municipalities have paused, canceled, or outright rejected contracts with Flock Safety. The reasons vary in specifics but converge on a single theme: the company's surveillance infrastructure, once examined under public scrutiny, consistently reveals capabilities, data-sharing practices, and security failures that were never disclosed during the sales process. What happened next, in state after state, reveals something more disturbing than the technology itself. When citizens started winning the fight for transparency, governments changed the law to make transparency illegal. ## Evanston: Plastic Sheeting Over the Cameras Evanston, Illinois, did not simply terminate its Flock contract. The city physically covered the cameras with plastic sheeting. The decision followed an audit by the Illinois Secretary of State that found Flock had violated state law by sharing local ALPR data with federal border protection agencies. Evanston had a sanctuary ordinance. The ordinance prohibited local cooperation with federal immigration enforcement. The cameras did not care about the ordinance. The data flowed through Flock's cross-jurisdictional sharing network, and federal agencies accessed it without the city's knowledge or consent. When the audit results became public, the city council did not wait for contract negotiations. They did not seek a renegotiated agreement with better privacy terms. They sent workers out with plastic sheeting to blind the cameras before the termination paperwork was complete. The gesture was as much symbolic as practical: a city government physically intervening to stop a surveillance system that had operated in violation of its own laws. ## Santa Cruz, Mountain View, and the Unauthorized Searches In California, the discoveries were even more staggering in scale. Both Santa Cruz and Mountain View deactivated their Flock camera networks after audits revealed that hundreds of unauthorized federal agencies had been conducting searches on local citizens. The agencies included the ATF, various inspector generals, and other federal entities that had never been approved for access by the cities that owned the camera contracts. The volume was not measured in dozens. Hundreds of thousands of searches had been run on local citizens by agencies that were never supposed to have access. The cities had signed contracts with Flock Safety to deploy cameras for local policing purposes. The data had been shared, queried, and consumed by an ecosystem of federal agencies whose access the cities never authorized, never knew about, and only discovered through post-hoc audits. Both cities pulled the plug. ## Oshkosh: Approved on Tuesday, Rescinded on Wednesday The Oshkosh, Wisconsin, city council approved a Flock Safety contract on a Tuesday. Less than 24 hours later, they rescinded it. The reversal was triggered by the city's Police Chief, who discovered after the vote that Flock representatives had provided the council with demonstrably false information during their sales presentation. The specific misrepresentations that the Chief identified were serious enough to warrant an emergency reversal of a contract that had been approved with full council support just the day before. The Oshkosh timeline is instructive because it illustrates how the company's sales process operates. The council voted yes based on the information Flock provided. A single law enforcement official reviewed the claims after the vote and found them to be false. If the Police Chief had not independently checked, the cameras would have been installed on the basis of a sales pitch that the city's own top law enforcement officer identified as dishonest. ## Oak Park: Zero Crimes Solved Since 2022 In Oak Park, Illinois, the Village Board examined the operational data and reached a conclusion that directly contradicted every claim in Flock Safety's marketing materials. The cameras had not meaningfully solved a single local crime since 2022. The audit also exposed devastating racial disparities. Eighty-four percent of drivers stopped in Flock-related traffic incidents were Black, despite Black residents comprising only 19% of the local population. The system, marketed as a neutral technological tool, was supercharging the same discriminatory policing patterns that the Village's civil rights policies were designed to prevent. In August 2025, the Village of Oak Park voted to exercise the termination provision in its contract. The cameras were removed. ## The Man Who Filed 50 Records Requests Jose Rodriguez lives in Walla Walla, Washington. He is not a lawyer. He is not a journalist. He is not an elected official. He is a resident who started noticing Flock cameras multiplying around his town and decided he had a right to know what they were recording. Rodriguez filed 50 public records requests to agencies across Washington State, seeking to obtain the ALPR data captured by Flock cameras in his community. The requests were simple. He wanted to see the data. He wanted to know what was being collected, how long it was stored, and who had access to it. Some cities responded by stalling. They delayed processing the requests until the footage was automatically deleted by the system's retention schedule. By the time the city fulfilled the request, there was nothing left to produce. Other cities responded that the data was stored on Flock's private servers and therefore was not a "public record" subject to disclosure. Rodriguez took the cities of Sedro-Woolley, Stanwood, and Everett to court. He argued that data collected by publicly funded cameras, capturing images of public roads, operated under public contracts, was by definition a public record, regardless of which private company's server stored it. He won. The courts ruled that Flock data is a public record and cannot be hidden behind a private vendor's infrastructure. The cities were ordered to produce the data. A private citizen, using nothing more than a public records statute and a willingness to litigate, had established a legal principle that threatened to blow open every Flock deployment in the state: if the data is public, anyone can see it. Anyone can see who was tracked. Anyone can see who ran the searches. Anyone can see whether the system was used as promised or abused for purposes the city never authorized. ## The "Driver Privacy Act" The Washington State Legislature's response to Jose Rodriguez's legal victories was swift, comprehensive, and perfectly inverted. In direct response to the court rulings establishing ALPR data as a public record, the legislature drafted and passed Senate Bill 6002\. The bill was titled, without apparent irony, the "Driver Privacy Act." Signed into law by Governor Ferguson in March 2026, the bill did two things simultaneously. First, it completely exempted ALPR data from public records requests. The court rulings that Rodriguez had won, establishing that citizens had a legal right to see the surveillance data collected about their own vehicles, were legislatively nullified. Under SB 6002, it is now illegal for a Washington State resident to request footage of their own car captured by a publicly funded camera on a public road operated under a public contract. Second, the bill expanded police authority to use the cameras. The previous legal threshold restricted ALPR use to felony investigations. SB 6002 lowered the threshold to encompass gross misdemeanors. The legislature simultaneously made it harder for citizens to see the data and easier for police to collect it. The legislative maneuvering is a perfect inversion of democratic accountability. A citizen noticed cameras appearing in his town. He used the legal system to establish his right to see what they recorded. He won in court. The legislature responded by rewriting the law to ensure that no citizen could ever do what he did again. The government and its private corporate partner claimed the right to absolute transparency over the movements of the citizen, while demanding absolute, legally protected secrecy for themselves. ## The Pattern Every city that canceled its Flock Safety contract discovered the same thing: the system they were sold was not the system they received. The data-sharing was broader than disclosed. The federal access was undisclosed entirely. The security was weaker than represented. The efficacy was unverifiable. And the contractual terms ensured that the city could not independently audit any of it. The 23 municipalities that have pushed back represent a fraction of the more than 6,000 that have not. The overwhelming majority of Flock deployments operate without the public scrutiny that triggered the Denver revolt, the Evanston shutdown, or the Oshkosh reversal. The cameras remain on the poles. The data continues to flow. The subscriptions auto-renew. And in Washington State, the precedent has been set. When citizens use the legal system to assert their right to see what the surveillance state is doing with their data, the surveillance state's response is not to reform its practices. It is to eliminate the citizen's right to ask. The question for every remaining municipality is not whether the pattern documented in this series exists. The evidence is overwhelming. The question is whether anyone in a position of authority will look at it before the next contract renewal comes up for a vote. *This is the final installment of Guerrilla News's five-part investigation into Flock Safety and the privatization of American surveillance. The full series covers the technology and its false promises, the officers and corporate employees who weaponized it, the catastrophic cybersecurity failures that left it wide open, the constitutional challenge that could dismantle it, and the cities that fought back. Read them, share them, and ask your city council one question: do you know what the cameras in your town are actually doing?* **Disclaimer:** This article is for informational and journalistic purposes only and does not constitute legal advice. References to municipal contract decisions, legislative actions, court rulings, and public records requests are based on publicly available government documents, published audit findings, and news reporting. Guerrilla News is an independent journalism outlet and is not affiliated with any company, government agency, municipality, or legal proceeding discussed in this report. ## Sources 1. ["The Case Against Flock Safety,"](https://deflockokc.com/the-case.html?ref=guerrilla.news) DeFlockOKC 2. ["How a $7.5 Billion Surveillance Company Built America's Largest Warrantless Tracking Network,"](https://myprivacy.blog/flock-safety-how-a-7-5-billion-surveillance-company-built-americas-largest-warrantless-tracking-network/?ref=guerrilla.news) MyPrivacy Blog 3. ["Berkeley Memo Lays Out New Concerns Over Flock Cameras,"](https://www.kalw.org/bay-area-news/2026-05-08/berkeley-memo-lays-out-new-concerns-over-flock-cameras?ref=guerrilla.news) KALW 4. [BCOS Resolution 2026-02 DRAFT with Memo,](https://bloomington.in.gov/onboard/reports/555/download?ref=guerrilla.news) City of Bloomington, Indiana 5. [Automated License Plate Readers,](https://www.oak-park.us/Public-Safety/Police-Department/Reports-Maps/Submit-ImagesVideo/Automated-License-Plate-Readers?ref=guerrilla.news) Village of Oak Park 6. ["The Nationwide Resistance Against Flock Surveillance Cameras Is Gaining Steam,"](https://truthout.org/articles/the-nationwide-resistance-against-flock-surveillance-cameras-is-gaining-steam/?ref=guerrilla.news) Truthout 7. ["Santa Barbara County Sheriff's Office Provides Update on ALPR Information Sharing"](https://www.sbsheriff.org/santa-barbara-county-sheriffs-office-provides-update-on-alpr-information-sharing/?ref=guerrilla.news) 8. ["License Plate Surveillance Logs Reveal Racist Policing Against Romani People,"](https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/11/license-plate-surveillance-logs-reveal-racist-policing-against-romani-people?ref=guerrilla.news) Electronic Frontier Foundation 9. ["Schmidt v. City of Norfolk,"](https://www.homelandsecuritynewswire.com/dr20260420-schmidt-v-city-of-norfolk-brief-automated-license-plate-readers-commit-fourth-amendment-searches?ref=guerrilla.news) Homeland Security Newswire