1. United States
2. Calif.
3. Letter

California needs to ban Flock Safety automated license plate reader cameras and pass legislation requiring their immediate, verifiable removal from every city in the state. What happened in Dayton, Ohio should never happen here — that city spent $30,000 auditing Flock camera usage, got caught sharing resident data with ICE, and ended up covering cameras with black trash bags because the contract wouldn't let them simply turn the cameras off. That is not accountability. That is a company with more power than the people it surveils. The core problem is that these contracts trap cities. Evanston, Illinois faced the same situation. Neither city could unilaterally deactivate or remove the cameras they paid for. California law should prohibit that kind of contract structure entirely, ban Flock's surveillance network from operating in the state, and require any existing cameras to be removed on a published timeline with mandatory progress reporting. Residents deserve to know exactly when the cameras come down, not just a promise that they will.