My Position
Flock cameras, and similar systems from other vendors, present too many serious privacy, legal, technological, and constitutional issues to continue to operate. We should cancel all contracts and remove the cameras, permanently.
Fourth Amendment — Continuous Location Tracking Requires a Warrant
The Flock system doesn't just catch a plate at a single checkpoint. It maps your movements across the entire city over days, weeks, and months. That is not a traffic tool. It is a retrospective surveillance record of your life.
In Carpenter v. United States, the Supreme Court held that prolonged collection of location data (even data held by a third party) requires a warrant under the Fourth Amendment. Chief Justice Roberts wrote that such records "provide an intimate window into a person's life, revealing not just his particular movements, but through them his familial, political, professional, religious, and sexual associations." License plate data collected citywide, over time, is exactly that window.
Law enforcement in Santa Clarita currently accesses Flock data without a warrant. Carpenter creates serious grounds to challenge that practice, and any prosecution built on that data. The city is incurring legal exposure on behalf of residents who never consented to being tracked.
Sixth Amendment — You Have the Right to Confront Your Accuser. Not a Camera.
The Sixth Amendment guarantees every defendant the right to confront the witnesses against them. When a machine is the only witness, that right becomes a hollow promise.
We've seen this before. Red light camera programs across California have faced repeated legal challenges on exactly this basis: defendants cannot cross-examine a camera. They cannot question whether it was calibrated correctly, positioned properly, or functioning as claimed on the day in question. The same problem applies to Flock ALPR reads used as evidence. A skilled defense attorney has grounds to challenge any conviction resting primarily on automated plate reader data, and the city should not be building cases on a legal foundation this fragile.
Privacy and Abuse of Power — The Data Gets Abused. Everywhere It Exists.
Mass surveillance tools don't just threaten constitutional rights in the abstract. They attract abuse by the people entrusted to operate them.
Across the country, law enforcement officers with access to ALPR systems have used them to track ex-girlfriends, surveil women they hoped to date, and monitor people they had personal grievances with: none of it for any law enforcement purpose. These are not isolated incidents. They are a predictable consequence of giving individuals unchecked access to a real-time location database of every vehicle in a city.
Santa Clarita has no meaningful public oversight of how Flock data is accessed, who queries it, or what they do with the results. There is no audit log the public can review. There is no independent watchdog. There is no recourse for a resident who is surveilled by someone who shouldn't be looking.
Until these systems are gone, every resident is at risk, and the women of our community most of all.