Above photo: Hundreds pack into a Town Hall in Denver. PSL Denver.
Outrage in Denver as Mayor sidesteps council to renew controversial flock surveillance contract.
Hundreds packed a conference room in Denver, Colorado on the evening of Wednesday, October 22, after the city’s Mayor Mike Johnston renewed a contract with surveillance company Flock without a public process or City Council vote, according to activists.
Just weeks after Denver’s City Council unanimously voted down a two-year, USD 666,000 extension with Flock in May, Johnston’s office approved a shorter-term deal worth USD 498,500, which is narrowly under the USD 500,000 threshold that would have triggered council oversight.
“Instead of joining us here at this town hall tonight, the mayor announced this morning that he is again unilaterally extending the city’s contract with Flock,” Katie Leonard, an organizer with the Party for Socialism and Liberation, told the crowd – who responded with resounding shouts of “shame!”
Flock surveillance
The driver-surveillance company Flock has garnered widespread opposition among civil rights activists and groups across the United States.
Flock Safety is a US-based surveillance-technology company that manufactures and operates automated license-plate-reader (ALPR) cameras and other vehicle-tracking systems for police departments, private communities, and businesses. Flock claims to operate in over 5,000 communities and 4,800 agencies nationwide across 49 out of 50 states.
Civil rights groups flag Flock’s network as a potential national mass-surveillance dragnet, linking tens of thousands of data points, searchable across jurisdictions. This becomes especially alarming in the context of Trump’s mass deportation operation and targeting of immigrant communities across the country.
“For-profit companies don’t offer free services without getting something in return. Flock will profit off the data being collected on the millions of people in Denver who will be under Flock’s mass surveillance system,” said Anaya Robinson, the policy director of the ACLU of Colorado. “Flock will have some type of access and some level of ownership to that data. There needs to be a higher standard set to protect the data privacy of people in Denver.”
The company has come under growing scrutiny following revelations that data from its nationwide license plate scanner network was, and likely continues to be, shared with Trump administration agencies, including ICE.
404 Media found that while Flock doesn’t hold a direct contract with ICE, the agency still accesses its camera data through requests routed via local police departments. Records reviewed by the outlet show that state and local law enforcement routinely mine automated license plate reader (ALPR) data, sometimes at the direction of federal authorities, sometimes as “informal favors,” and sometimes in ways that may facilitate immigration enforcement.
In one example, multiple datasets obtained by 404 Media show that a Texas sheriff’s office searched records from more than 83,000 ALPR cameras to locate a woman suspected of having an abortion.
Recent documents from Virginia reveal even more sharing of driver surveillance data from Flock to ICE. Reporters at the Virginia Center for Investigative Journalism recently discovered that yet another police department had been giving federal immigration authorities access to Flock’s driver-surveillance data.
Despite repeated assurances from police that such sharing wasn’t happening, records show outside law-enforcement agencies ran over 7 million searches of Virginians’ driving data in a single year, including about 3,000 related to immigration enforcement.
Movement grows against Flock
“Just following a weekend when millions of people poured out into the streets for No Kings day protests, one man made a decision – behind a closed door, with the CEO of a private company – about a technology that threatens all of our constitutional rights,” said Leonard during the town hall meeting, referring to the “No Kings” protests on October 18 that brought seven million people to the streets in cities across the country.
“We don’t need a king of Denver to make decisions for us,” said Leonard. “We can and we will determine our future.”
A broad movement has grown in Denver against Flock and what is viewed as Mayor Johnston’s overreach. Those in attendance at last week’s town hall include Denver activists as well as civil rights and neighborhood organizations, including the ACLU, the Party for Socialism and Liberation, the Villa Park neighborhood organization, and city officials such as City Council members Sarah Parady, Serena Gonzalez-Gutierrez, and Shontel Lewis. Many in the town hall called for the cancellation of Denver’s contract with Flock and for all Flock cameras to be taken down.
