On March 10, the San José City Council voted unanimously to adopt new safeguards for its network of 474 Flock Safety license plate reader cameras, reducing data retention from one year to 30 days, restricting where cameras can be placed, and tightening access controls for outside law enforcement agencies. Workers, immigrants, and community members showed up to City Hall and made their voices heard. While the Council took some steps forward, residents and advocates had called for more, including cutting ties with Flock Safety entirely.
Across the Bay Area, cities have been grappling with what Flock Safety actually is, and what it enables. An internal audit revealed that from August to November 2024, several federal law enforcement agencies accessed Mountain View’s Flock cameras without the city’s permission or knowledge, because Flock had quietly enabled a nationwide search setting on its own. Mountain View called it a system failure. But the deeper problem is this: a private vendor had the ability to open a city’s surveillance infrastructure to federal agencies, and no one in the city government knew it was happening until it was too late. Santa Clara County, Mountain View, and Los Altos Hills have all since terminated their Flock contracts. San José has not.
The legal pressure on the city is mounting. Civil liberties groups sued San José in November 2025 over the cameras’ violation of California’s constitution. In April 2026, a second federal lawsuit was filed, this time seeking class-action status on behalf of all San José residents, arguing that nearly 500 AI-connected cameras tracking every driver’s movements without a warrant or probable cause constitutes an unconstitutional mass surveillance system. The suits make clear that the guardrails the Council adopted in March didn’t go nearly far enough.
Meanwhile, Mayor Matt Mahan has been one of Flock Safety’s most prominent boosters, appearing in promotional material on the company’s own website touting San José’s expansion of the camera network. That’s worth noting as the city weighs its next steps.
This isn’t just a technology story. It’s a story about power. Who has it, who doesn’t, and how decisions that shape our daily lives are being made behind closed doors. Every surveillance contract a city signs is a choice about who gets watched, who gets trusted, and who gets power. Those choices should be made openly, with community input, and with the ability to say no, not handed off to vendors in a procurement process most people never see.
The Flock fight is part of a larger pattern. Across Silicon Valley, surveillance infrastructure is being built out, from license plate readers, facial recognition, to data-sharing contracts with companies like Palantir, with little public debate and even less public understanding of what these systems do, who can access the data, and what happens when it’s wrong. In some cases, the same platforms touching crime data are also touching immigration enforcement and benefits eligibility. The line between city services and surveillance is blurring, and it’s happening in a regulatory void. That’s exactly why we’re building a coalition to demand democratic control over how these technologies are deployed in our communities.
Real public safety requires transparency and accountability. When private vendors can operate city systems without oversight and open them up to federal agencies without anyone knowing, that doesn’t make our communities safer — it makes them more vulnerable, especially for immigrant communities, people seeking healthcare, and residents exercising their right to protest.
