On Aug. 5, I voted along with the 5-2 majority on the Oak Park Village Board to cancel our contract with Flock Safety and deactivate the 8 Automatic License Plate Reader (ALPR) cameras that have been operating in our community since 2022.
As a recently appointed trustee, this was one of the first substantial votes of my political career, and one that I was proud to make as both a technologist and a public servant.
For those who haven’t heard of it, Flock Safety is a tech company that sells ALPR cameras to law enforcement and private businesses around the country to track every vehicle that drives by. Users of this system can then search for a license plate number (no warrant required!) and find out where that car has been.
If you’re in law enforcement, this sounds like a great tool. And so, it has spread quickly across the country. Since their founding seven years ago, Flock has inked contracts with over 5,000 municipalities and installed tens of thousands of cameras along public roads and highways.
While Flock isn’t the first company to develop this technology, they have successfully followed the Silicon Valley startup playbook by selling to governments with artificially low prices backed by venture capital to capture market share and develop a much more lucrative product: a national network and archive of vehicle location data.
It is the very value of this network, and Flock’s willingness to share and sell access to it, including to the Trump Administration, ICE, CBP, and Texas police enforcing anti-abortion laws, that makes this technology so dangerous.
Flock claims ALPR cameras are a necessary tool for modern policing and that they have the necessary data protections in place.
According to our own Civilian Police Oversight Commission, over 99% of Flock alerts do not result in any police action. While Flock’s marketing emphasizes success stories, the company has been unable to provide meaningful, independently verified data on long-term effectiveness.
Regarding data protections, Flock claims that each community owns their own data and can control who can have access. This is not true and their own service agreement contradicts it. We’ve seen direct evidence of data being shared without knowledge or consent of participating municipalities.
Meanwhile, the harms of this system are real. In just the past two months, we’ve learned how a Flock camera tracked a woman’s abortion travel, that Illinois cops gave ICE access to more than 5,000 cameras and now both the Illinois Secretary of State and Congress have launched investigations into the company.
We are living in an era of surveillance capitalism — a society dominated by unregulated and invisible technology that spies on us constantly. In 2014, NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden warned us that the surveillance put in place by our own government would lead to “turnkey tyranny.” Now in 2025, that tyranny has arrived with the second Trump Administration, and they’ve never had more powerful tools at their disposal.
The scale of these systems, from the phones in our pockets, to social media platforms, to “smart” doorbells, to the network of cameras recording every person and car that goes by, can seem overwhelming.
But as a trustee, I have the power to act. I, along with four of my colleagues, took the small but significant step of refusing to spend taxpayer dollars to surveil and oppress our communities — just like Austin, Denver, Evanston, and many others did.
Read a longer version of this post at https://derekeder.com/blog/why-i-voted-to-cancel-flock.