another public comment on flock cameras

This past Tuesday I again made a public comment at my city council meeting. I got some contacts afterward that will hopefully lead to some change (or at least some improvements)

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Good afternoon mayor and council, my name is Brendan Trachsel and I have lived in Flagstaff for about five years. Today, I come to you with continued concerns regarding Flagstaff’s Flock Camera usage, in addition to my public comment from March 18th, 2025.
As established through my previous comment and additional readings sent to the council in writing, Flock Safety cameras are an extremely problematic technology. Through private contracts with over 5,000 entities, including Flagstaff PD, Flock has built a nationwide consolidated private & warrantless database covering the daily movements of millions of people. We are being tracked without any cause, with our own tax dollars. In my opinion, this alone is reason enough not to have such a system, but I continue.
When I spoke to the council previously, how this technology would be used and misused was still being discovered. In March, I gave an example of a police chief in Kansas using it to stalk his ex-girlfriend over 200 times. Since then, my concerns have only been validated, which led me back here today.
In the last two and a half months since my last comment, we have had the following major developments:

In California, even though it is illegal, police departments are sharing Flock tracking data with states that have banned abortion and are seeking to prosecute for out of state actions.
Authorities in Texas performed a nationwide search of more than 83,000 Flock cameras while looking for a woman who they alleged had a self-administered abortion, including cameras in states where abortion is legal such as Washington and Illinois.
Nationwide, police departments have been tracking people through Flock on behalf of ICE to assist with deportations. We also know through API data that Flock is in negotiations with the federal government to gain full access to their database.

These examples represent the rotten core of this technology: you do not have control over how it is used. A resource that may have been meant to track stolen vehicles here in Flagstaff has no protection against being used by an overarching state or federal government. This is an inherent trait of dragnet surveillance, and is why it must be avoided at all costs.
To conclude, I would like to highlight that Flagstaff PD does not participate in the Flock Safety transparency portal program, which means that the public does not know how many cameras there are, where they are, their usage policies and statistics, the number of lookups, audits on their reasoning, or literally anything. I again plead with this council to take action to cancel this contract. I will be sharing more readings via email to the council after this.
Thank you.

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