Public Safety and Surveillance Capitalism

the only truly secure way to prevent our data from being used against us is to never allow them to record it in the first place.

As an abolitionist, I know that more police, more prisons, and harsher punishments aren’t how we prevent crime. While Emeryville police are among the best in The Bay Area, they’re no more effective than other policing organizations at preventing crime. They show up after crimes are committed and help us file paperwork, but your catalytic converter is already long gone. We can’t keep funneling our city’s public safety budget solely into one very expensive solution.

We need to provide our citizens with services beyond policing to truly improve public safety. Public services have been proven to prevent more violence per dollar. Mental health counseling and funding for local afterschool programs. Upgrading parks into active hubs for young people to gather and peacefully enjoy themselves without needing to spend a dime — Learn about Third Spaces. Legal and bureaucratic assistance for those who find navigating the paperwork needed to get anything done especially difficult.

And finally, I want to encourage people to get to know our neighbors. Emeryville is a lively up-and-coming city full of interesting people. Getting to know our neighbors is an excellent way to help us build safer communities. Showing up for each other when someone’s in trouble or noticing when something isn’t right can help save our local services.

Have I Been Flocked?

ALPR cameras don’t only record criminals. They record all of us, all the time. In reality, they record us first and look for crimes to pin on us after the fact. Even when they can’t find wrongdoing, they keep that data to find other ways to profit from it.

You can enter your license plat number on this site to see if Flock or other companies like it have recorded data about you.

haveibeenflocked.com

Surveillance Capitalism

Surveillance tech companies are, like any other big tech corporation, primarily after making money for their shareholders. Every mission statement about public safety, peacekeeping, and national security is marketing. Their every policy comes down to them making more money, every quarter, forever.

Keep that in mind when Flock Securities, Motorola, Axon, Genetec, Leonardo, Neology, or any other like it come to your city council meetings and lie through their teeth.

ACLU article titled Flock Safety Credibility Lost as it Repeatedly Lies to City Councils, Police Departments, and Public Across the Country

Their profit motive is directly at odds with public safety.

They want to trick our police and local reps into paying them our taxpayer money on unsubstantiated promises of added safety. We pay for them to put cameras up in our neighborhoods. They charge us subscription fees in perpetuity of the contract. Then they sell the data gathered about our families and every other person in range. They take money from us at all three stages of this grift and have no responsibility to actually deliver us safer streets.

Not only that, but these funds are taken from city budgets that could instead be hiring more teachers, paying for social programs, refurbishing our parks, or any number of other practical solutions that have been proven to do a better job actually preventing crime.

And this bad outcome would all be excellent for Flock’s bottom line. Their solution for every public safety problem will always be to send them more money.

Who Wants Surveillance Data?

The short answer: The worst people on the planet, including ICE, authoritarians, stalkers, and corporations who use it to raise prices.

Think about it. Who would want:

where you are (and inversely aren’t)
when you’re there
who you’re with
you not to know they have that data

If they were honest about wanting our data, they’d ask us for it. They’d tell us why they want it and let us say yes or no. Instead they anonymously buy our data from a middleman without our knowledge. This means…

Every data broker customer is in that market because they want to use our data against us.

When ICE kidnaps a parent dropping off their kid at school, they likely used Flock-style data to do it.
When Target, Lyft, or DoorDash raise prices using surveillance pricing, they likely use this type of data to inform them the maximum price we’d pay for it.
When someone gets assaulted or robbed by their abusive ex, there’s a good chance the perpetrator knew where the victim was or when they weren’t home because of surveillance data their chatbot could find access to.

This is the biggest reason we should stop this whole industry in its tracks, yesterday. Not just their environmental impact. Not just their horrible impact on our human social environment. Not because someday the machines will take over like in the movies. Because the bad guys are already here, right now, and these are their most weapons against the rest of us.

Let’s Talk About AI for a Moment

All surveillance networks use some form of AI to organize their data. And even if they don’t do that in-house, their data is fed into any number of AI tools in perpetuity once it’s recorded and put on their network. Those networks are accessed by the worst people on the planet freely, and the next worst people can easily hack into those networks and steal it too.

This is why the only truly secure way to prevent our data from being used against us is to never allow them to record it in the first place. The next step will be stopping new data centers from being built and tearing apart or heavily regulating the ones we’ve already built.

AI is Racist

I highly recommend following the Algorithmic Justice League and Joy Buoloamini

As with most technology, AI is grossly under-sampled from data about black and brown folks. It’s also tested primarily excluding minority groups to save resources, and likely for nefarious systemic racist reasons too. This has led to several stories about AI marking innocent people as criminals, cops arresting or harassing those innocent people, and then shrugging after inflicting that violence on those people and deflecting blame to each other.

Artificial Intelligence Is Putting Innocent People at Risk of Being Incarcerated

Then the victims sue the city police department and taxpayers have to pay for those lawsuits too.

Surveillance Tech is Fascist

The CEO of Flock Safety is an open techno-fascist. His job requires him to be one, of course, but he’s really playing the role with gusto.

In 2026, I’d hope anyone in the Bay Area knows the most obvious algebraic equation in the last few decade’s political discourse:

antifa = antifascist
anti-antifa = fascist

When the CEO of Flock points at people peacefully and legally trying to protect our communities’ privacy against his company and labels us terrorists, we can assume his AI is marking us that way in their data. So when law enforcement, ICE, loan officers doing background checks, judges, or anyone else looks at that data they see an arrow pointing to our faces that says “terrorist”.

Not because we’re actually bad or dangerous people, but because we’re bad for Flock’s bottom line.

This is occurring all over the country as Flock cameras record and bank data from peaceful protests and use facial recognition AI to track us. Have you marched in a No Kings rally? Did you support Black Lives Matter? Have you protested wars in Iran, Palestine, or anywhere else? Most of us have. And Flock probably knows that.

Want more convincing about this? Look at how Flock communicates with police about us:

The attacks aren’t new. You’ve been dealing with this for forever, and we’ve been dealing with this since our founding, from the same activist groups who want to defund the police, weaken public safety, and normalize lawlessness.

Our Sanctuary City Declaration Requires Us to DeFlock Emeryville

While it’s hard to find an official source for the declaration (we should fix that) the original declaration included:

The City of Emeryville shall refuse any requests that are an extension of any federal immigration policy enforcement actions to federal authorities and shall not enter into any agreements to carry out such federal enforcement actions or dedicate any City time or resources to such enforcement, but leave such actions to federal authorities;
City of Emeryville declares Sanctuary City Status prior to Trump Inauguration (E’ville Eye)

Our contract with Flock Safety violates this resolution. We have entered into an agreement that’s supplied city time and resources to provide surveillance data from Flock to ICE and other organizations.

Does Flock Security Sell Data?

In April 2026, Flock changed their terms and conditions about whether or not they sell data and several other major privacy agreements. Their sales pitches have no stopped telling us otherwise, of course. This is how every big tech company grift functions, every time. Big early promises and steeply degrading quality and higher costs after they get their foot in the door.

Does surveillance keep us safe?

No. Crime still occurs when cameras are recording. Surveillance does not prevent or deter crime.

A Ring camera on someone’s door doesn’t prevent the porch pirate from stealing their package. It just gathers photos and video the victim can use to try and convince the sender to ship a replacement, or to convince an insurance adjuster to approve a claim.

The victim still lost their package and now has to do all the work to recover from that. Those businesses will put up speed bumps to avoid eating the cost. Then those businesses will raise premiums or prices to distribute that cost on future customers.

The crime occurred. It harmed the victim. It harmed a secondary victim in the business. It harmed a tertiary victim with the uptick in future costs. The thief probably got away, perhaps after expending some local police resources making a vague attempt to catch them. Ring profited.

This is the same with surveillance cameras, except the city who pays for it doesn’t get to choose to put the cameras up in the first place — actually, we do, but only when electing city council members. 😇 Join Me!

DeFlock Emeryville

Now that you know all this, let’s #deflockEmeryville.

Go to city council meetings. Help them make more informed decisions.

These were some of the first issues I brought up in public comments at city council meetings. I was not alone in these concerns, but the council seemed to ignore them when they made their recent decisions about ALPR cameras and surveillance tech in our city. That’s part of why I’m running to join the council.

Even if I don’t win a seat, I hope my place in this campaign helps raise awareness of these critical issues. I’ll continue speaking up about them win or lose and look to organize with you to keep up the fight either way.

This is how our neighbors in El Cerrito were able to do what we need to do in Emeryville. And then we need to help other cities protect themselves the same way by setting the example and turning the tide.