Derek Eder

Civic Tech Builder

Derek Eder

I use data, build tools, and organize people in Chicago to democratize power. Read more »

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Derek Eder

Derek Eder

Civic Tech Builder

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Why I voted to cancel Oak Park's contract with Flock (and so should you)

Published on Aug 22, 2025

Update: On August 25, 2025, IL Secretary of State Giannoulias conducted an audit that found Flock Safety’s sharing of Illinois license plate camera data with U.S. Customs and Border Protection to be in violation of State law. Read more >

On August 5th, 2025, I voted along with the 5-2 majority on the Oak Park Village Board to cancel our contract with Flock Safety, Inc 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.

This post is for my peers in other cities - elected officials across Illinois and the US. And hey, if that’s not you, read on and consider passing this on to your own representatives.

What are ALPR cameras and who is Flock?

For those who haven’t heard of it, Flock Safety, Inc is an Atlanta based tech company that sells Automatic Licence Plate Reader (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, like wildfire, it has spread quickly across the country. Since their founding 7 years ago, Flock Safety has inked contracts with over 5,000 municipalities and installed tens of thousands of cameras along public roads and highways. In Illinois alone, 650 of these cameras have been installed since 2023 with grants from the Illinois Attorney General.

A Flock ALPR Camera in Oak Park, IL. Photo by Paul Goyette

A Flock ALPR Camera in Oak Park, IL. Photo by Paul Goyette

While Flock Safety isn’t the first company to develop or sell this technology (Motorola has been in this business for at least a decade), 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.

The real-world harms of surveillance technology

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, Customs and Border Protection, and Texas police enforcing anti-abortion laws, that makes this technology so dangerous to not only our immigrant community, but to the entire nation.

ALPR Cameras in the United States, mapped by DeFlock.me

ALPR Cameras in the United States, mapped by [DeFlock.me](DeFlock.me)

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 data and tools at their disposal.

Why you should vote to remove it

The scale of these systems, from the phones in our pockets, to social media platforms, to the ‘smart’ doorbells on our neighbor’s doors, to the network of cameras recording every person and car that goes by, can seem overwhelming.

But as an elected official, you do have the power to act. You can take the small, but significant step, as we did in Oak Park, IL (and Austin, TX and Denver, CO) of refusing to spend tax payer dollars to surveil and oppress our communities.

You’ll likely get pushback, as we did, from law enforcement, or Flock themselves about how these ALPR cameras are a necessary tool for modern policing and that they have the necessary data protections in place.

I can say, however, that the data to back up these claims are murky at best. According to our own Civilian Police Oversight Commission in Oak Park, over 99% of Flock alerts do not result in any police action. While Flock’s marketing emphasizes success stories, the company has been unwilling or unable to provide meaningful, independently verified data on long-term effectiveness. Most “successes” involve recovering stolen vehicles or making low-level arrests - often in other jurisdictions that accessed Oak Park’s data.

Regarding data protections, Flock Safety claims that each community owns their own data and can control who can have access. This is not true. Their own service agreement contradicts that by stating “Flock may access, use, preserve and/or disclose the Footage to law enforcement authorities, government officials, and/or third parties, if legally required to do so or if Flock has a good faith belief that such access, use, preservation or disclosure is reasonably necessary”. In practice, we’ve seen direct evidence of data being shared without knowledge or consent of participating municipalities.

Meanwhile, the harms of this system are real, and more details are coming out every day. 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 nationwide, a DEA agent used Illinois cop’s Flock license plate reader password for immigration enforcement searches and now both the Illinois Secretary of State and Congress have launched investigations into the company.

A call to action and solidarity

I’ll close with this: in 2008’s The Dark Night (the best Batman movie), Bruce Wayne and Lucius Fox build a system that taps into everyone’s cell phones to create a real-time surveillance network for all of Gotham in order to find the Joker.

The Dark Knight (2008), Morgan Freeman as Lucius Fox and the SONAR system

The Dark Knight (2008), Morgan Freeman as Lucius Fox and the SONAR system

In many ways, this is the dream that surveillance capitalists have been selling to their customers for years. And as time has moved on and technology has progressed, we’re getting awfully close to this level of real-time surveillance.

Fox describes the system as “wrong”, “unethical” and that it was “too much power for one man”. And at the end of the movie, they choose to destroy this dangerous system to prevent it from being used and abused.

If Batman can do it, so can we.

Kevin Barnhart and Alicia Chastain contributed to this post. A special thanks to Trustees Leving Jacobson, Enyia, Straw and President Scaman for voting with me to cancel the Flock contract, and to Freedom to Thrive Oak Park and countless community members that spent years researching, organizing, and advocating for it.

Cities that have cancelled their contracts with Flock Safety

Relevant coverage of Flock Safety and ALPR cameras

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