[Subject: Please Vote NO on the Flock Safety Contract Extension]
Dear Mayor Ishii and Members of the Berkeley City Council,
I am writing to urge you to vote against the proposed renewal and expansion of the City of Berkeley’s contracts with Flock Safety. As a Berkeley resident and community member, I am deeply concerned that this surveillance infrastructure poses serious and documented risks to the most vulnerable people in our community.
Flock’s automatic license plate readers and Condor cameras are not passive tools: they systematically collect detailed data about our movements – even those of citizens who have committed no crimes. That data has repeatedly been shared with federal agencies in violation of California law. Oakland and San Francisco police departments have both been caught funneling Flock data to immigration enforcement, and a University of Washington study found at least eight law enforcement agencies in Washington State did the same.
These are not hypothetical risks. Berkeley is already on the Trump administration’s shortlist of sanctuary cities targeted for federal crackdowns, and renewing these contracts (including a proposed $310,000 four-year Condor contract and 16 additional ALPRs) would hand federal agencies a roadmap into our community.
Beyond immigration enforcement, Flock’s data has been misused in other alarming ways. In a case documented by 404 Media and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a Texas sheriff accessed over 83,000 Flock cameras nationwide — including in states where abortion is legal — to track a person who had self-administered an abortion. Flock permitted this access even when it violated Illinois state law.
This is not an edge case: it is evidence that Flock’s data-sharing architecture cannot be adequately controlled by local policy, especially when the data is stored on Amazon servers that carry no legal obligation to withhold information from federal agencies. The recent partnership between Flock and Amazon’s Ring camera network only deepens these concerns, expanding the potential reach of mass surveillance into residents’ front doors.
The City of Berkeley should not be in the business of building surveillance infrastructure that puts immigrant residents, people seeking reproductive healthcare, and other vulnerable community members at risk.
Flock’s own claims about crime reduction have been shown to rely on cherry-picked data. Even if we accept their best-case figures, no reduction in property crime justifies the scale of harm this technology enables.
I urge the Council to reject these contract extensions and instead direct resources toward community-based public safety solutions: job training, violence interruption programs, and affordable housing investments that have a demonstrated record of building genuine safety from the ground up.
Please vote NO on the Flock Safety contract renewal.
Thank you for your time and your service to our community.
[Your Name]
[Your Address / District, if applicable]
[Your Email / Phone]