Berkeley, CA
At a special meeting, the Berkeley City Council voted 5-4 to approve a 12-month, $200,000 extension of its Flock Safety ALPR contract, then voted 8-1 to reject a proposed expansion that would have added fixed cameras, community video streams, first-responder drones and criminal investigations software. The expansion contract could have totaled roughly $2 million. About 100 public commenters opposed both the renewal and the expansion.
What moved this decision
- Conflict with Berkeley’s sanctuary city ordinance
- Risk of federal agency access to residents’ data
- Cost of new surveillance infrastructure during a budget deficit
- Flock’s outsourcing of review labor to low-paid workers in the Philippines
- Roughly 100 public commenters opposed
What happened afterwards
Berkeley is a counter-example to the regional cancellation trend: it kept ALPR while refusing to grow the surveillance stack around it. After the meeting the council referred future surveillance technology expansions to the city manager for a competitive bidding process, opening the door to vendors other than Flock. Opponents grounded their case in Berkeley's sanctuary city ordinance and in Flock's outsourcing of labor to low-paid contractors in the Philippines - an argument largely absent from other jurisdictions' debates.