City of Camarillo
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Item Type Agenda Item
Position Oppose
Comments Dear Mayor, Councilmembers, and City Staff,
I am writing to express my vehement opposition to any current or proposed use of Flock Safety cameras in Camarillo. I understand and support the City's responsibility to protect residents and give law enforcement effective tools to
investigate crime. But I believe Flock represents a
fundamentally different kind of technology than an ordinary security camera, and I do not believe it has a place in our community.
A traditional security camera records what happens in a particular location. If a crime occurs, investigators can potentially review that footage. Flock, however, creates something much more expansive: a system capable of
continuously collecting information about vehicles traveling through our community and making that information
PUBLIC COMMENTS
Agency City Council / Camarillo Sanitary District / Camarillo Library Board
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Wednesday, August 26, 2026 05:20 PM
City Council / Camarillo Sanitary
District / Camarillo Library Board
Meeting Date
Wednesday, August 26, 2026
Planning Commission Meeting Date
1 searchable after the fact. It can create a record of where a vehicle was, when it was there, and potentially where it traveled before and after passing a camera.
That changes the fundamental question from, "Who was at this location when a crime occurred?" to, "Where has this vehicle been?"
The overwhelming majority of people whose movements would be recorded have done absolutely nothing wrong. They are going to work, visiting friends and family, going to restaurants, visiting doctors, attending religious services, taking their children somewhere, attending political events, or simply going about their daily lives. Yet their movements would be collected and retained anyway.
I strongly reject the argument that this shouldn't concern anyone because people are driving on public roads. Privacy is not about having something to hide. It is about having the ability to live your life without the government creating a searchable record of your movements. You should not have to be
suspected of a crime for your movements to deserve privacy.
And these concerns are not theoretical. We do not have to look across the country to find examples of what can go wrong with Flock. It has already happened here in Ventura County.
The Ventura County Sheriff's Office discovered that out-of-state law-enforcement agencies had queried its Flock data more than 364,000 times between February 19 and March 19, 2025,
despite the Sheriff's Office having disabled Flock's "National Lookup" feature in 2023 specifically to comply with California law. The Sheriff's Office said it did not authorize the feature to be reactivated and did not know that it had been reactivated.
Think about that: more than 364,000 searches in approximately one month, involving data belonging to people in Ventura County, without the Sheriff's Office knowing that the access was occurring.
This is exactly why I don't believe residents should simply be asked to trust that safeguards will work as intended. Ventura County had already established a safeguard. The Sheriff's Office had specifically disabled nationwide searching. Yet the setting was somehow reactivated.
That raises a question that I believe every Camarillo
Councilmember should be asking before allowing Flock into our city: Who actually controls access to our data, and how would Camarillo know if those controls were changed, bypassed, or otherwise failed?
The problem became even more concerning when the Oxnard Police Department suspended its use of its Flock cameras after discovering a similar issue involving unauthorized out-of-state 2 access. Ventura Police Department has also reported
discovering a vendor configuration problem that allowed out-of- state agencies to query its system without authorization.
These are not hypothetical possibilities that might someday occur. They have already occurred in our own backyard.
There are also documented examples of authorized users
misusing ALPR technology for personal purposes. In one
reported case, a police lieutenant was accused of using police technology, including license-plate-reader information, to monitor his estranged wife. That illustrates another
fundamental problem: once highly detailed location information exists, the City must depend on people and policies to ensure that it is not abused.
And what happens when the technology gets something wrong? There have been documented cases in which Flock surveillance information contributed to an innocent person being wrongly identified during a theft investigation. A license plate, location, date, and time may look extremely precise, but that information does not necessarily establish who was driving the vehicle, why the vehicle was there, or what the person was doing.
An automated surveillance system can be precise and still be wrong about what the information means.
That distinction matters enormously when surveillance
information can influence an investigation involving an innocent person.
There are also serious cybersecurity concerns. Security researchers and journalists have reported finding Flock cameras exposed on the public internet without authentication, raising concerns about unauthorized access to live surveillance feeds and camera capabilities. A company entrusted with surveillance information about an entire community should be held to an extraordinarily high standard when it comes to protecting that information and infrastructure.
And this brings me to perhaps my biggest concern: the City is being asked to create an infrastructure that cannot simply be undone later.
Technology changes. Policies change. Personnel change.
Administrations change. Law-enforcement practices change. A system introduced for one purpose can eventually be used for another purpose that residents never contemplated when it was approved.
Once years of historical location information have been collected, we cannot uncollect it. If Camarillo decides five or ten years from now that it no longer wants this level of surveillance, we cannot give residents back the record of everywhere their 3 vehicles have been.
That is why I don't believe there is a "middle ground" where the City can simply adopt Flock with enough policies, restrictions, or contractual safeguards to make the problem go away. The fundamental issue is the creation of the database itself.
Even if every current policy were followed perfectly, the City would still be creating a system that collects information about innocent people's movements. Even if every employee acted appropriately, the system would still create an extraordinarily valuable database that could be sought, accessed, shared, misused, or compromised. And even if the technology worked exactly as intended, it would still fundamentally change the relationship between residents and their government by making our movements increasingly observable and searchable.
I want Camarillo to be safe. I want our police officers to have effective tools to investigate serious crimes. But I do not believe public safety requires the government to maintain a searchable record of where innocent residents drive.
The fact that Flock may help solve some crimes cannot, by itself, justify creating a surveillance infrastructure that affects everyone.
The question should not simply be, "Can Flock help solve crimes?" The more important question is, "Is solving those crimes worth creating a system that continuously collects and retains information about the movements of everyone else?" I believe the answer is no.
Camarillo has an opportunity to make a deliberate choice about what kind of community it wants to be. We can pursue public safety without normalizing mass surveillance. We can give law enforcement effective investigative tools without creating a permanent record of the movements of innocent residents.
There should be no path for Flock cameras to come to
Camarillo.
I respectfully urge the Mayor and City Council to reject the Flock Safety program—not merely postpone it, not merely add
additional restrictions to it, and not simply ask for assurances from the vendor, but reject the deployment of Flock cameras and remove them from the city altogether.
You should not have to be suspected of a crime for your movements to deserve privacy. And once we create a system that records those movements, we cannot uncollect the
information.
Thank you for taking my concerns seriously and for considering the privacy and civil liberties of the people you represent. 4 Sincerely,
Brian Beals
Camarillo Resident
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IDENTIFICATION
Name Brian Beals
Address 368 Spring Oak Rd Unit 1827
Camarillo, CA, 93010
Telephone (805) 501-8019
Email [email protected]
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