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Residents urge Grass Valley to end Flock Safety camera contract over privacy concerns
Summary
Dozens of residents, including privacy advocates and an experienced video-systems engineer, urged Grass Valley’s City Council to terminate its Flock Safety contract, arguing the cameras enable regional data sharing, mission creep, and Fourth Amendment risks; the council did not take formal action on the contract at this meeting.
Dozens of residents urged the Grass Valley City Council to cancel the city’s contract with Flock Safety and remove automatic license-plate recognition (ALPR) cameras from public streets, arguing the system threatens privacy and local control.
At the start of public comment, an attendee asked the council to "terminate all contracts with Flock Safety, remove the cameras from our community, and restore expectation that law‑abiding residents can travel through their own city without having their movements recorded and stored." Several later speakers echoed that request, saying the datasets these systems create can be shared beyond local agencies and are vulnerable to improper access.
Tony Kaiser, a self‑identified video‑systems engineer, framed the issue as constitutional and technical. "We the people decide what is unreasonable," he said, arguing ALPRs that record video data replicate the sort of mass surveillance the Fourth Amendment was designed to prevent and can produce false positives, mission creep, and broad sharing that outlives today's policies.
Multiple other commenters, including Shane and Anna Delgato Campbell, described national reporting and records that, they said, show Flock Safety or similar vendors have facilitated broader agency access and created opportunities for misuse. Rachel Darl, attending her first council meeting, asked whether the council session was the right forum to get answers; staff directed her to a public meeting scheduled the next day at 4 p.m. at the Love Building.
Speakers asked the council to end the relationship with the vendor rather than rely on policies or audits they called insufficient safeguards. "Once data is collected, the community is forced to trust that every future administrator, every future policy, every future software update, every future sharing agreement will continue to respect the limitations that are promised today," one commenter said.
The council did not vote on or otherwise resolve the contract during this meeting. Staff and council members pointed to an upcoming public meeting and to regular opportunities for community engagement where questions about the program can be addressed further.
Next steps: council staff referred interested residents to a scheduled public meeting the following day; no formal council directive or motion regarding Flock Safety was recorded in this session.
