Any contract with Flock threatens Oakland's sanctuary city protections by creating surveillance infrastructure that will be exploited by federal immigration enforcement, despite Oakland's ongoing litigation to defend sanctuary jurisdictions. Surveillance companies like Flock are largely unregulated—Oakland’s Privacy Advisory Commission named this when it rejected OPD’s use policy and Flock contract.
Your own experts on the PAC noted that Flock Safety has proven itself an untrustworthy company with no credibility. Several commissioners highlighted Flock's history of using as many as 50 million stolen data points, sharing clients’ ALPR data with ICE and U.S. Border Patrol despite promises to the contrary, and being "willing to lie" about it. Even with California's SB 34 law prohibiting data sharing with federal agencies, seven federal agencies accessed Oakland's data in July 2025 for immigration purposes.
Besides being untrustworthy, Flock has a reported history of misrepresenting the effectiveness of its surveillance systems at reducing crime. On numerous occasions, Flock has publicly claimed their automated license plate readers (ALPRs) as responsible for significant reductions in crime that cannot be attributed to ALPRs such as crime reductions that took place before cameras were installed. In fact, one such study of ALPRs in neighboring Piedmont showed that over 99% of ALPR hits did not lead to investigative leads.

I live in District 2 and strongly oppose FLOCK in oakland. Please vote NO on any OPD use policy or city contract that use Flock Safety's surveillance technology to collect and store the data of millions of law-abiding Bay Area residents that ICE and the federal government can access without a warrant or oversight.

I live in District 3 and oppose the partnership between OPD and FLOCK. I urge the Mayor and City Council members to heed the advice of the Oakland Privacy Advisory Commission in October.

Rather than investing in a surveillance approach to preventing crime, Oakland can use the proposed funds to invest in improvements that build trust with communities:
- Improved lighting in business districts and residential neighborhoods
- Safety ambassadors, who are already working downtown
- Violence prevention, similar to the efforts that have already reduced crime by 36% in District 4
- Mental health crisis response

Cities like Evanston, IL and Austin, TX formed partnerships with FLOCK. Neither city received the promised safety results from their partnerships, and in both cases, the data collected by license plate readers, Ring doorbells, business cameras, and drones was gathered into databases that were accessible to the federal government. During this time of oppression by the Trump regime against the people of this country, we do not need to hand them more data and power.

Please do not use public resources to fund a partnership that has proven to be untrustworthy and unsuccessful when attempted elsewhere. Vote against the funding of a FLOCK contract with the OPD!

Flock surveillance is a violation of our 4th amendment right to warrantless search and seizure. Just because the police don't own the cloud servers, doesn't mean they aren't responsible for our tracking and sharing Oakland's data nationwide. I do not consent to having my whereabouts shared with other Flock subscribers. Citizens of Norfolk, Eugene and Dallas aren't standing for it, nor should Oakland. Police who happen to be stalkers have followed their ex-girlfriends in an attempt to find out who they're dating. Imagine the possibilities! My tax dollars should not be used to pay expensive settlements that would be a result of such malfeasance. Flock has little oversight, since when is it wise to trust a private corporation with massive data surveillance. As my representatives I demand protection from warrantless mass surveillance.

My name is Ben Golder and I am a District 3 resident and software engineer. I think we could find many ways to spend $2.25M on public safety that would be more effective. Flock introduces tremendous security risks to detailed identifying information about Oakland residents and where they travel every day, no matter how private. Flock has a track record of enabling inappropriate data sharing between agencies. Flock would be ineffectual, introduce risks of exposing extremely sensitive information, and reduce trust between law enforcement and our community. We can do better with these funds.

As a 22-year Oakland resident, I strongly support keeping the Flock cameras in place. Research and local data show that this technology helps reduce crimes such as car break-ins, vehicle theft, and other property offenses — all of which had been on the rise in our city. Since the Flock cameras were installed, Oakland has seen sharp declines in these types of incidents.

While it’s true that correlation doesn’t prove causation, the timing and scale of these improvements suggest that the cameras have played an important role in deterring and solving property crimes.

At the same time, I understand and respect the community’s concerns about privacy. We can and should address those through clear safeguards — such as strict data-retention limits, transparent oversight, and prohibitions on data sharing with outside or federal agencies. Many other cities have successfully adopted similar guardrails while keeping their camera networks effective and accountable.

Oakland can find that same balance: protecting both public safety and personal privacy. For these reasons, I respectfully urge the Council to continue supporting the Flock camera program, with robust privacy protections in place.

Flock cameras have proven to be effective at fighting crime. The cameras has resulted in retrieving stolen vehicles, recovering stolen goods, and the arrest and prosecution of persons associated with crimes. A few months before the cameras were installed, a friend was driving her 8-year-old son on Interstate 580 near the Harrison Street exit at 6:20 on a June evening. Two gangs in SUVs were shooting at each other with total disregard for the safety of others. My friend's son, riding in the back seat of her car, was struck in the neck by one of the bullets. The little boy's life was saved by the doctors and nurses at Highland Hospital, but he will be paralyzed from the neck down for the rest of his life. Sometime later, one of the SUVs were recovered. To my knowledge, no one has been arrested. I often wonder if the Flock cameras had already been installed and the SUVs identified and stopped by the police before the shooting if that little boy would not have been shot and would be living a normal and healthy life. Your responsibility is to keep the citizens of our city safe from criminals. There is a lot of room for improvement, and the Flock cameras are an essential tool for this. No criminals have been sent to jail over this shooting, but this innocent little boy will be imprisoned in his body for the rest of his life, a victim of the high crime rate in Oakland that affects all of us.

It's obviously a bad idea to build a surveillance state while there is an authoritarian regime in the whitehouse that are rounding up people based on the color of their skin. Building a surveillance network like Flock is the first thing regimes do when they come to power, having so called democrats build it for Trump is beyond stupid, so much for being a sanctuary city.

Not only is this a bad idea in general but Flock specially, are:
• Known to collaborate with ICE
• Provide front, back & side door access making it impossible to tell how often ICE access data
• Have no regard for the privacy or security of the data they store
• The data is so poorly secured it's already had leaks
• The hardware is so poorly secured you can easily hijack
• FTC will soon be investigating Flock for defrauding investors due to the poor security practices
• Lie about how effective their tools are

Skipping the procurement process to throw money at a shady vendor because Councilmembers Wang & Houston, are funded by the same Tech-Oligachs that benefit from adoption of surveillance tech is suspicious AF, especially as the city faces bankruptcy due to previous bad contracts at the port, the politicians/staff that signed them get to walk away while the rest of us still have to pay their bill.

Those pushing this largely dont live here.

Don't build a surveillance network
Don't waive the normal process
Don't do business with Flock
Do investigate OPOA, Empower Oakland & FOU's ties to Flock "Safety"

I am an Oakland resident who is against the use of FLOCK cameras. Our beautiful city does not need more surveillance of its people. It does not need to waste taxpayer dollars on a useless technology. OPD should not be free to watch Oaklanders as they wish. Imposing regulations on the cameras use is not enough- we've seen OPD misuse its technologies before. As a city, we need to reject this technology completely. A new flashy technology does not make it safe or useful. Research shows FLOCK is dangerous and unhelpful. I know the City wants to protect its residents, and rejecting FLOCK is the way to do so. Thank you for making the correct choice for Oaklanders.

I am a D3 Oakland resident urging the Council to support and expand Oakland's use of Flock cameras. Coach Beam's suspected murderer was apprehended due to the use of camera footage, both public and private. This kind of technology is a clear and effective way to make up for our severely understaffed police force.

We should of course make sure that we follow California state law and configure our Flock data to not be shared with any outside agencies like ICE. This is a simple and legally required step to take. Setting aside confusion and fearmongering, Flock cameras are a clearly effective solution to make our cities safer and we should leverage them.

I'm an Oakland resident urging you to support OPD's continued access to Flock camera footage.

The opposition focuses on hypothetical scenarios of harm, while Oakland residents face actual, daily harm. With only 511 available officers and response times that have doubled since 2018, we're experiencing a real public safety emergency. Flock cameras help identify suspects when we barely have enough officers to respond to calls. Removing this proven tool now, during an acute staffing crisis, prioritizes political posturing over protecting our most vulnerable neighbors, including the immigrant communities who are disproportionately victimized by crime.

We can have both accountability AND effective policing. But we cannot afford to handicap our understaffed police force based on speculative concerns while ignoring the documented harm happening to Oaklanders right now. Support OPD's Flock camera access.

As an Oakland resident, I strongly oppose the contract to expand Flock OS systems.
The Privacy Advisory Committee rejected it 4-2.
The data gathering targets communities of color in Oakland. This is search without any probable cause, and its only goal is to criminalize and punish those with the highest vulnerabilities to violent policing
Flock itself is a completely untrustworthy company which flouts contracts and regulations, carries our illegal activities and has lied about its activities.
Guaranteed, regardless of "law" or judicial decisions, if the data exists, the Trump Administration and Bondi will access it at the federal level to continue their extra-judicial activities.
Thank you.

Using technology and cameras, police were able to quickly track down the suspect in Coach Beam's murder. Oakland Police need technology and force multipliers to help resolve crime and get the perpetrators off the street. In addition to the Flock cameras and technology, we need policy that assures that the technology is used responsibly.

I strongly support using FLOCK cameras to deter crimes in Oakland. Ethical use of technologies like this combined with clearly enforced policies will improve the overall safety in our community.

Cameras save lives!

I am an Oakland resident and I urge you to accept the recommendations of Oakland privacy commissioners and reject the proposed OPD Community Safety Camera System use policy and FLOCK Safety Contract. FlockOS is ineffective and a waste of public resources. A 2025 study in Oak Park found that 99% of FlockOS alerts resulted in zero police action. Flock technology doesn’t deliver on its public safety promises—this is why Oak Park and 5 other cities—Eugene, Evanston, Austin, Denver, and Sedona—terminated their Flock contracts in 2025. Why would we spend $2.25M for surveillance that generates overwhelming false positives with minimal investigative value?

Surveillance companies like Flock are largely unregulated—Oakland’s Privacy Advisory Commission named this when it rejected OPD’s use policy and Flock contract. While Oakland is actively suing to defend sanctuary cities, it is dangerous and hypocritical to consider building the surveillance infrastructure that undermines those protections.

Even if Oakland tries to protect our data, Flock and other state agencies have already been caught sharing it, directly or indirectly, with ICE. It already happened in Oakland just three months ago (July 2025), when seven federal agencies accessed Oakland's ALPR data despite OPD policy and California's Senate Bill 34 protections.

I am an Oakland resident who is opposed to Flock and any Automatic License Plate Readers (ALPR) system in Oakland. Residents are already aware that vehicles’ license plates are not the only data points that Flock cameras are recording. Police are able to use Flock data to map individuals’ movements across the region—and police have done so even without any evidence of illegal behavior or criminality. I, like so many Oakland neighbors, want Flock off of Oakland streets because surveillance does not equal public safety and surveillance cameras cannot create safety for individuals. ALPR cameras are capturing video and images 24/7 and with this technology police are capable of mapping everyone who crosses the cameras’ paths in Oakland. This level of police surveillance is extreme and is a violation of our privacy. There should be no contract for Flock or any ALPR surveillance without the consent of the people. This public comment box is where I can communicate that I do not consent and Oakland should OPT OUT of Flock.

Oakland is a Sanctuary City, but our cameras are vulnerable. Mass surveillance systems like ALPRs and Flock will collect data that the Trump Administration will seize. The lack of meaningful safeguards and Flock’s own history of broken promises is exactly what your own experts on the Privacy Advisory Commission warned about when it rejected FlockOS in a 4-2 vote. Oakland created the PAC specifically to evaluate surveillance—we can't build a $2.25 million deportation machine and act surprised when they use it.”

As an Oakland resident in D1, I strongly oppose the use of FLOCK in our community, and I urge you to reject the OPD Community Safety Camera System use policy and FLOCK Safety Contract.

Oakland is a sanctuary city - I am alarmed at the risks posed by OPD use of Flock surveillance systems that connect privately-owned Ring doorbells, business cameras, and drones into one nationwide tracking network—a network which ICE and other federal agencies have confirmed they can access for deportation investigations as recently as October 2025. Using Flock in Oakland would allow for constant tracking and increased threat of surveillance to all of us, but especially our most vulnerable and at-risk immigrant neighbors, already at risk under the current federal administration's increased ICE activity. Oakland's economy depends on all residents—regardless of immigration status—feeling safe to live, work, shop, and build their lives here.

There are more effective safety solutions than FlockOS. For $2.25M, Oakland could fund safety promoting actions such as improved lighting in business districts and residential neighborhoods, safety ambassadors (already working downtown), and mental health crisis response. Your own experts on the Oakland Privacy Advisory Commission noted that Flock Safety has proven itself an untrustworthy company with no credibility.

I urge the council to reject any OPD use policy or contract that invests in Flock Safety's dangerous surveillance systems. thank you.

My name is Jenny Tighe. I am a District 1 resident joining the many many others to urge you to reject the Flock contract. This contract furthers Trump’s agenda of surveillance and attacks on our vulnerable populations for the sake of control. We do NOT manage Oakland the way the Trump administration operates. I just can’t believe Oakland is even considering such an awful program.
FlockOS threatens our sanctuary status/immigrant communities. Even if Oakland tries to protect the data, Flock and other state agencies have already been caught sharing it, directly or indirectly, with ICE. Federal agencies are already using FlockOS-type systems for deportation investigations—ICE, Secret Service, and US Navy confirmed access to Flock’s network in October 2025.

FlockOS is ineffective and a waste of public resources. A 2025 study in Oak Park found that 99% of FlockOS alerts resulted in zero police action. Flock technology doesn’t deliver on its public safety promises—this is why Oak Park and 5 other cities—Eugene, Evanston, Austin, Denver, and Sedona—terminated their Flock contracts in 2025. Why would we spend $2.25M for surveillance that generates overwhelming false positives with minimal investigative value?
Despite the widespread use of ALPRs in law enforcement agencies, research on their efficacy is sparse. Of the studies that do exist, there is little empirical evidence that justifies their use, especially on the large scale at which ALPRs are currently being employed.