At their November 9 meeting, our City Council will begin reviewing the City’s contract with Flock Automated License Plate Readers. It is my hope that they will cancel it, not replace Flock with a similar product, conduct a comprehensive independent review of all City surveillance and data sharing, and enact strict policies to prevent future encroachments on our civil liberties.
Unlike red light and bus lane cameras, Flock and its competitors like Axon do not document or enforce traffic violations. Rather, they log the license plates of every car that passes them and check them against a national hotlist.
This means that Culver City is potentially aiding police in Texas and Florida who are looking for people who have come to California for abortions or gender-affirming care.
Flock’s data is also available to Federal agencies, including DHS/CPB/ICE/etc. While CCPD and Flock will claim that Flock is compatible with Culver City’s Sanctuary policy, because the City has opted out of direct sharing with Federal immigration enforcement, they are deliberately ignoring that our data is shared with agencies, such as LAPD, who share with ICE et al, and that there are countless examples of police illicitly sharing information, whether as informal collegiality to their uniformed brethren or open defiance.
Flock similarly claims they only collect license plate numbers, and police repeat this talking point. This is also technically true, but similarly omits that it is easy for police to use DMV records to find out who a vehicle is registered to and to access voluminous public and commercial databases on that person. At least one company has announced software to automatically do this, and Flock itself has proposed integrating these searches.
LAPD dropped Flock because it regularly misread plates, mistakenly identifying 161 vehicles as stolen during a two-month sample period. We don’t know how many of those false positives led to innocent people being treated as dangerous suspects as they have in other communities, such as being chased and boxed in by police vehicles or falsely charged and jailed.
However, even if Flock or a similar system worked flawlessly, this level of surveillance is incompatible with a free society. Freedom of movement: the right to pass through public space without being tracked by the authorities, is fundamental. It’s promised by Article 13 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Every Flock camera is a police checkpoint. Imagine being required to stop every few blocks to show your ID and have it logged. Flock uses technology to do this without us needing to stop. It’s less inconvenient, but no less oppressive.
The Fourth Amendment to the US Constitution says:
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
John Adams, the author of this amendment, wrote the last clause to ban “general warrants,” which were commonly used by the British and allowed police to search anything and anyone they thought might be relevant to a case. I am not a lawyer, but whether or not one considers “original intent” relevant to Constitutional interpretation, it seems clear that Flock violates this clause by comprehensively identifying vehicles without warrants or probable cause.
In August, in Chatrie vs. US, the US Supreme Court ruled that tracking someone using their cell phone’s location data counted as a search under the Fourth Amendment. Earlier this month, a Federal District Court in Oklahoma ruled that Flock also met the criteria, with Judge Sara Hill writing:
Freedom from persistent, dragnet-style surveillance while in public is not a foreign concept in our society, and it is a reasonable expectation that society already accepts, but it becomes constitutionally problematic when law enforcement can indiscriminately and passively catalog your whereabouts over an extended period of time and then use that information for any purpose whenever convenient.
Surveillance advocates argue that those of us objecting must have something to hide, but the correct question is: what do we gain by trading away some of our civil liberties? At the meeting on the 9th you will hear police and Flock’s representatives insist that it helps them “solve crimes,” but they will not back this up with independent peer-reviewed research or any evidence besides their word. Adjusting for demographics, police budgets, etc, do cities with Flock have higher clearance or conviction rates than those without? Do they have lower rates of reported crime? I guarantee no verifiable evidence has been or will be provided. Police will insist that we trust them, and we should not. What other profession demands so much power with so little justification?
There are countless stories of police abusing Flock, often men stalking former or prospective romantic partners or harassing the men dating their exes. Flock initially required officers to log the reason for each search but did nothing as cops entered things like “LOL” and “sexy,” then replaced the open text field with a dropdown menu of utterly generic choices to protect their clients and themselves from embarrassment or liability. Neither police nor the companies producing surveillance systems benefit from restrictions or accountability. Their motivations are increased power and profit.
Flock tracks every vehicle in nearly all of the US. There are currently 646 ALPRs in and near Culver City, so you are being logged every few blocks. No one should have this power. Tolkien fans know the Ring cannot be used for good; it turns its wearer into a monster. It must be destroyed in the fire in which it was made.
I hope you will contact our Council Members, show up on the 9th, and keep showing up until we have rolled back the surveillance state. Here are some useful resources on Flock and other police technologies:
- The Electronic Frontier Foundation: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/08/effs-policy-position-alpr-surveillance-eliminate-it-and-reduce-its-harms
- ACLU: https://www.aclu.org/campaigns-initiatives/get-the-flock-out
- Jon Oliver: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lnBPhelCdWE
- Stop LAPD Spying: https://stoplapdspying.org/alpr-letter/
- 404 Media: https://www.404media.co/tag/flock/
- De-Flock: https://deflock.org/
Why is it Called “Flock?”
Police are taught to see themselves as sheepdogs, guarding ordinary people (sheep) from criminals (wolves). Automated License Plate Readers are a powerful tool for minding the flock.
This is a false and poisonous worldview. The world is not divided into a clueless majority and smaller groups of protectors and predators. No one is good or bad by nature. The idea that there is a class of “bad guys” out there leads directly to profiling, while seeing residents as dumb sheep encourages police to reject civilian authority. Every CCPD Chief in my lifetime has routinely responded to City Council questions with a level of contempt that would have gotten any other department head fired.
Looking for “bad guys” ignores the reality of crime and the failure of police to address it. More money is lost to wage theft than property theft: a person is more likely to be ripped-off by their employer than to be mugged, burgled, or a victim of package theft. Outgoing CCPD Chief Sims looked absolutely befuddled when I told him this, but at least Mamdani is on the job. The Culver City News, a reliable repository for police press releases, appears to have never placed the words “wage” and “theft” next to each other:
I sometimes think that the rich are the ranchers in the sheepdogs/sheep/wolves scenario.
Even worse, for violent crime, we are far more likely to be assaulted, raped, or killed by someone we know than by a stranger. Profiling “bad guys” won’t protect us from our friends, parents, or partners. Indeed, these crimes are often rooted in the same patriarchal logic (or “art of manliness”) as the “sheepdog philosophy:” women and children are property who owe their protectors obedience and gratitude, and violence is a man’s prerogative (as shown in Vivek Ramaswamy’s recent campaign ad) .
I think we can do better, as men, as people, and as a community.