Warrant Required

The ask, in one sentence

If the government wants to search a database of where people have driven, it should have to get a warrant — and if it will not agree to that, it should not build the database.

That is the whole campaign. It is not a demand that police give up investigative tools. It is a demand that a specific, well-understood constitutional check apply to a specific, extraordinarily powerful one.

Why the campaign is named for the remedy, not the vendor

Flock Safety is the largest vendor, but it is not the problem. The problem is warrantless, indiscriminate, networked collection of innocent people’s movements — and that problem survives a change of vendor entirely intact.

This is not a hypothetical concern. Of the 118,623 ALPR camera coordinates volunteers have mapped nationwide, roughly 82% are attributed to Flock Safety — and the rest are spread across 30 other named vendors, with some operated by private parties rather than by police. A campaign named after one company would declare victory the moment a city signed with a different one. We would rather name the standard we actually want, so that the win condition is unambiguous.

What we ask cities and counties to adopt

1. A warrant requirement for any search of stored plate data, with narrow, written exigent-circumstance exceptions.
2. A short, enforced retention period, with automatic deletion that is verified rather than promised.
3. No outbound data sharing by default. No national or regional sharing without a specific, published agreement and a public list of every agency with access.
4. Published audit logs. Who searched, when, and under what stated justification — reported to the council on a fixed schedule, not on request.
5. Vendor neutrality. The policy governs the capability, not the brand, so replacing the vendor does not reset the protections.
6. A public vote before adoption or renewal, with the contract and policy published in advance.

This is winnable, and it is being won

In the first week of August 2026, two Arizona jurisdictions ended their license plate reader programs within roughly forty-eight hours of each other.

• Chandler announced on August 7 that it will discontinue its 40 Flock cameras and not renew its agreement, after a routine audit identified what the police chief described as potential misuse of the system by someone inside the department.
• The Pinal County Sheriff’s Office announced days earlier that it will not renew its Flock contract when it expires at the end of September 2026, citing Fourth Amendment concerns. Roughly half the affected cameras sit inside San Tan Valley.

Chandler is the largest Arizona city to end a Flock partnership. Both decisions followed months of sustained, organized, and entirely ordinary civic pressure — residents reading contracts, speaking at council meetings, and asking questions that did not have good answers.

Read the full account in our research, where every claim is sourced.

Where the campaign is active

Our focus is the Phoenix East Valley — Chandler, Gilbert, Mesa, Tempe, Queen Creek, San Tan Valley, and Apache Junction — where decisions made in one city set the template for its neighbors. See where we work for the current status of each jurisdiction.

A note on DeFlock

DeFlock is a separate, independent project, started in October 2024, that crowdsources the locations of license plate readers into OpenStreetMap and maintains a directory of local groups working on this issue. It is not affiliated with Unsurveilled in either direction, and we claim no rights in its name.

We link to it because it is genuinely useful: if you want to see what has been mapped in your own area, their map is the best public starting point. Credit for that data belongs to OpenStreetMap contributors and the volunteers who surveyed it.