In early August, my social feed was flooded with viral videos of people criticizing Flock cameras. The videos had hundreds of thousands of likes and shares, and the comments were extremely hostile towards the expansion of surveillance in their cities.

I wondered if people were actually this concerned in the real world, or if this was just a social media thing. But later that week, as I was walking to the Clipse concert at The Independent on Divisadero, I noticed the Flock devices I had included in our surveillance map article had been covered with duct tape:

Later I saw a video of this intersection posted on Instagram with someone damaging these exact cameras. The video had hundreds of thousands of likes and shares, with many supportive comments posting standing ovation memes. So clearly some people in SF are opposed to these things.

In contrast, the same week, GrowSF published a study claiming that San Francisco voters overwhelmingly support police drones and cameras, concluding with:

I found the phrase “all a-tizzy” very dismissive of the concerns of activists, many of whom are very well informed. GrowSF seemed to imply that their worries about surveillance were unfounded or unserious. Then they used “normal people” in contrast to activists, as if organizations like the ACLU and EFF (groups with legal and technical expertise) don’t have legitimate concerns.

On Wednesday, August 19th, I attended “Flock out of SF”, a teach-in and action event centered around Flock cameras in San Francisco. The room was filled to capacity, with at least 100 people in attendance. Going in, I was already fairly aware of what was happening with surveillance in San Francisco, but I still learned quite a bit at the teach-in.

The speakers at the event presented information about the devices and how they impact residents. The people behind it included representatives from Bay Resistance, Tech Workers Coalition Bay Area, ICE Out of SF, SIREN, DeFlock SF, and more. Speakers from each group discussed Flock cameras through different lenses. Some discussed immigration, while others discussed policing, privacy, labor, and technology. While they each cared about different aspects of surveillance, they all agreed on the goal of getting Flock out of San Francisco. And they were all out here in the flesh in the “real world”, and seemed like “normal people” to me.

One speaker explained how an ALPR reads license plates, but it can also record time, location, vehicle make, model, color, and visible features. SFPD describes those capabilities as a way to generate investigative leads, but the event’s organizers described them as a way to build a “pattern of life.”

Another speaker mentioned how WIRED reported that SFPD had accidentally exposed live feeds from five Skydio police drones through a public link that required no authentication. The feeds included color and thermal video, GPS telemetry, and footage of arrests, bystanders, homes, and vehicles. Even if guardrails exist, a simple misconfiguration can result in you going about your everyday life being livestreamed on the internet without your consent.

The presenters also frequently discussed the topic of immigration enforcement. California law currently restricts local police from sharing ALPR data with federal and out-of-state agencies. Yet in 2025, SF Standard found that outside agencies had run more than 1.6 million searches of San Francisco’s Flock data, including at least 19 with references to ICE. SFPD said the outside access was cut off and that it was auditing the system.

Toward the end of the event, the speakers highlighted communities including Santa Cruz, Los Altos Hills, Mountain View, and Stanford that had ended Flock contracts or moved away from the system. Next to victories was the phrase “Abolition vs. Guardrails.”

San Francisco’s Flock contract runs through February 2027. From what I’m seeing, the pro-Flock position will be to keep the contract and simply tighten restrictions and oversight. In response to Mission Local’s question on the subject, District 8 candidate Manny Yekutiel has said he supports Flock “with real guardrails.” All three of his opponents oppose the system.

The activists I met also oppose the system and don’t think guardrails will prevent abuse. In my experience working with technology companies, incidents like these would make me seriously question whether I wanted to keep expanding my reliance on these systems. But in this case, the response from supporters seems to simply be another round of guardrails, even after hundreds of documented ALPR abuses.

I came away thinking that GrowSF’s description of these people as activists getting “all a-tizzy” was a fairly weak response to legitimate concerns and the list of documented incidents. The presentation was very well sourced and discussed many documented failures. These weren’t your basic “tech = bad” and “AI = bad” types of arguments.

Either way, there is an upcoming battle on whether to keep the cameras with better guardrails, or simply take them down altogether.