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October 2 Newsletter

Hi Neighbor,

Welcome back to the Deflock Sac Metro newsletter! From local to national, there has been movement across the board against the fight on ALPRs. This week, we tried to keep the stories we highlighted local-ish with information from cities within a few hours of the Sacramento area.

We put out a newsletter in your email every 1st and 3rd Friday of the month packed with local and national updates, action items, and upcoming events in the Greater Sacramento area that are from allied organizations or opportunity to interact with local representatives outside of the council chambers. These newsletters will come with scripts and talking points to help you form public comment off agenda. Even when we do not have the ability to have big crowds regularly at city council and board of supervisor meetings, the consistent and persistent comments help lay the groundwork for when the time comes for when the contracts come up.

HOPE:

Let some of these community wins in other cities encourage you to keep the pressure up:

Placer County, California. On September 21, over 70 community members in Auburn packed City Hall to voice their opinions regarding Flock. Many people shared their concern regarding consent and the cameras. One person declared “No one asked us if it would be OK to spend our tax dollars to construct a warrantless tracking system of cameras that log where we travel.” Their neighbors in Grass Valley suspended the local ALPR program and canceled the Flock contract over the summer. The momentum is building! Full article can be found here.

At the time of preparing this news letter, 402 contracts have been cancelled since October of 2024. Secure Justice has developed a tracker that is on their website. You can check that out here. These stories show how public pressure can lead to change from the law enforcement offices and the elected officials. Please be inspired by that to continue to pressure our officials to remove all ALPRs from our streets.

REASON:

It seems like every day there is a new article that comes out with a new story of an officer abusing the system, Flock getting caught in another lie, or even confirmations of what we already were aware of. Check out these others:

Stockton, CA Stockton PD Chief announced September 21 that an internal audit found an officer misusing their surveillance system. They did not expand on what type of abuse or identify them, but shared that they have been terminated as of August 19, 2026. This came 3 weeks after city council member Jason Lee raised concerns at a city council meeting after receiving a letter alleging that an officer was using the system to stalk his girlfriend (article here). SPD plans to shift the audit responsibility to their Professional Standards Unit for it to be reviewed every 30 days. You can read more about this here and here.

San Jose, CA An officer has been fired after it was found that he was sharing the location information of a woman to his cousin. The cousin was accused of domestic violence against the woman but hasn’t been charged. She was able to report this to police because he told her that he knew where she was. Since she knew his ties to the police department with his cousin, she turned reported it to the police who were able to confirm the ALPR usage. The investigation was initiated in February 2025 and was just disclosed this past week. You can read more information here and here, and watch a video here.

As always, check out the Institute for Justice’s database logging ALPR abuses nationwide for the most up to date information coming out in between newsletters.

Action:

Election day is on November 3rd. The best action we can do is put people in local positions who are willing to work with community members and have the hard conversations about policy that the general public doesn’t agree with. Not just do the bidding of private companies and PACs who donate to them. Here are some questions you can ask anyone running in any city or county:

1. Have you looked into how ALPR is actually used here, or are you going off what the vendor or department told you?

2. Do you know our current data retention period, off the top of your head?

3. Would you support an audit process that isn’t run by the company that sold us the system?

4. Have you accepted campaign contributions from a surveillance technology company or its lobbyists?

5. If evidence of misuse turned up after you’re elected, what would you actually do about it?

Ballots go out starting October 5th, make sure to take the time to fill yours out and drop off or go to polls once early in person voting starts. CalMatters put together a quiz to help you decide how to vote on the propositions, you can find that plus more info here.

Local Highlights:

There are a lot of really great organizations across the Sacramento Region doing great things. We want to highlight a few for you here. Additionally, there are some city elected officials with opportunities to meet outside of council chambers.

Make sure to sign our petitions at https://c.org/XbmBXxLqvg and https://c.org/B2rtgCd29r

In solidarity,

Deflock Sac Metro Community

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