FORT BRAGG, CA., 11/21/25 – The Fort Bragg Police Department this week unveiled a new online portal that allows residents to see how the city’s network of seven Flock cameras is being used to combat crime — in a way that officials say does not jeopardize people’s privacy.
The system detects license plates and vehicle makes and models, but it does not scan for faces, people, gender or race. “We want people to understand these are being used legitimately and lawfully,” Fort Bragg Interim Police Chief Eric Swift said. “We don’t want people to be fearful and misunderstand our intentions for using these cameras.”
The purpose of the portal is to give residents full access to see how police use data collected from license plates.
Use of the popular public safety camera system has faced increasing pushback in recent months as the federal government expanded its immigration crackdown, often using license plate data and facial recognition software to track undocumented people.
Earlier this week, Bay City News reported that the Oakland Public Safety Committee could not advance a $2.25 million contract with Flock Safety after a 2-2 vote. A majority was needed to move the proposed expansion of Oakland’s Flock camera system to the City Council for approval.
Oakland activists rallied against the expansion over concerns that federal law enforcement could use the technology to spy on residents, which they said would violate the city’s sanctuary policies.
Swift said that has never been the intention in Fort Bragg. “California has very specific and strict laws, and we’re not sharing this information with the federal authorities for immigration enforcement,” he said. He added that the data the city collects is not shared with third parties or federal agencies and is scrubbed after 30 days.
Fort Bragg installed its first Flock Safety cameras in high-traffic areas in and out of the city in July 2023. “Our cameras are used for cases involving things like stolen vehicles,” Swift said. “If there’s a title, a plate number or even just a vehicle description connected to a crime — whether it’s a stolen car, a kidnapping, an assault — our cameras help capture the information tied to that vehicle. They’re designed to identify the car involved and place it at the scene.”
Information about such cases is shared between agencies in Mendocino County and throughout California.
“For example, if a car is stolen in Ukiah and then comes into Fort Bragg, we wouldn’t know unless an officer spotted it and already knew we were looking for it,” Swift said. “But with the cameras, Ukiah can put that vehicle on a hot sheet, and once it passes one of our cameras, we get an alert immediately — this plate belongs to a stolen vehicle out of Ukiah, and it’s now in our jurisdiction.”
Swift said the new public portal was created to bolster accountability. “The transparency portal lets us show exactly what we’re doing with the data, and it allows us to be very clear and transparent with the public,” he said.
The portal can be accessed at http://transparency.flocksafety.com/fort-bragg-ca-pd.
This article presents Flock Safety exactly as the company wants to be presented. Every line about privacy, limited retention, not recording conversations, and community protection mirrors the company’s corporate talking points. None of it is independently verified, and none of it addresses the issues already documented in Flock’s own technical materials. Every claim being made here is lifted directly from Flock’s public communications, not from any independent evaluation of how the system functions in practice. Fort Bragg PD is the source of these statements, and the article simply repeats the department. That is a closed loop of assertion rather than evidence. When a department parrots a vendor and a news outlet parrots the department, the public ends up reading corporate messaging disguised as objective reporting.
A recent investigation in an article I published last month documented what this piece avoids entirely. Flock’s Raven acoustic sensors, already deployed nationwide, have the capability to analyze human vocal sounds. The Electronic Frontier Foundation reported directly that Flock is rolling out distress detection, which flags human screams and automatically alerts police. These microphones are not theoretical. They already exist. They were installed under the pretense of gunshot detection. The software update transforms them into tools that monitor vocal expression. Whether Fort Bragg activates the feature is irrelevant to the underlying fact that the capability is built in. This article does not ask Fort Bragg PD whether the devices are installed, whether the updates will be adopted, whether any audio analysis policy exists, or whether the city will disclose if or when these features are enabled. Without those answers, assurances about privacy carry no weight.
The same pattern applies to ALPR data. Flock’s cameras document and store travel patterns of ordinary people who have no suspicion of wrongdoing. The scan itself is the search, which places these systems directly within established Fourth Amendment concerns. United States v. Jones and Carpenter v. United States make it clear that long-term tracking of public movements requires a warrant because it reveals intimate patterns of life. This article does not mention that at all. It also ignores California Civil Code sections 1798.90.5 through 1798.90.55, the statutes that govern ALPR systems. Those laws require posted usage policies, strict retention limits, audit logs, narrow constraints on data sharing, and clear documentation of enforcement. None of those documents are linked. None are referenced. None are shown to exist. Trust is not a compliance mechanism. Compliance requires actual policy.
The recent Oregon ruling in Washington County reinforces this point. A judge held that warrantless access to ALPR databases is an unlawful search because the database itself allows the government to reconstruct a person’s movements over time. The court emphasized that the constitutional violation occurs at the moment the data is captured and stored inside a long-term investigative system. The violation does not begin at the moment of the police query. The logic matches Jones and Carpenter. Mass surveillance that tracks innocent people by default violates the requirement of individualized suspicion. This article ignores that evolving legal landscape entirely.
The pattern of misleading assurances is not new. Flock has been accused of sharing ALPR data with ICE in Illinois in violation of state restrictions. The company also attempted to reinstall cameras in Evanston after the city ordered them removed. These events reveal a corporate culture that expands surveillance regardless of community decisions, legal limits, or public expectations. None of this history appears in the article.
Instead, the public is presented with a series of vendor assurances recycled through local law enforcement. The pattern is uniform across the country. Flock makes a claim. A department repeats the claim. Media outlets reprint the claim. No one verifies the claim. This article reads exactly like that process. It never asks what the devices can do. It never asks whether retention logs exist. It never asks whether the microphones are present. It never asks whether data is shared with other agencies. It never asks how often outside searches occur. It never asks whether Fort Bragg has complied with California ALPR laws. It simply restates the vendor’s narrative as if it is confirmed fact.
My investigation outlined how these systems evolve by design. Cameras become microphones. Microphones become analytics platforms. Analytics become behavioral predictions. Predictions become pre-crime indicators. These transformations occur through software updates, not public votes. Once the infrastructure is installed, its purpose expands to the full extent of its capability. That is how surveillance grows. It is deployed for one purpose, justified for another, and quietly repurposed again with no public consent. The pattern is visible everywhere these devices appear.
This article avoids every one of those realities. It does not address technical capability. It does not address statutory requirements. It does not address constitutional limits. It does not ask Fort Bragg PD for evidence rather than promises. It presents a narrative crafted entirely from corporate talking points and delivered without scrutiny.
Readers deserve to know what this technology can actually do and the legal risks it creates. What they received instead is a restatement of a vendor’s sales messaging filtered through a police department that is repeating the same claims.
Everyone should go their respective public safety agencies and request the information on their own vehicles over the past 30 days. Everyone. Denial of public access to public information captured in public by public agencies is unconstitutional. Records of who is logging in to check on these “investigations” should be available if we are captured and looked at. We have zero guarantees that the police aren’t just looking up where people they don’t like are going or whether they check up on the cute lady who lives across the street from their house and then labeling those checks as “investigation” all the while. Transparency is not what’s being offered through this garbage portal.
Information collected by public agencies on our public movements is public information that should be accessible in detail by public records requests. Every single person who is interested should request their own information about their own vehicles and see how many times they’ve been photographed and cataloged. Everyone has a right to know exactly what has been captured by a public agency using our public information. If we have no expectation of privacy then neither do they. It’s all our information. It belongs to us. Denial of records requests is going to lead to lawsuits that the city will lose.
This article is a joke. A real journalist would be able to tell in 5 minutes that the ‘safety portal’ is just an attempt to throw us crumbs and shut us up. Why aren’t local reporters asking real questions? Why have two local news outlets posted articles that are essentially PR pieces for the police in the last week? Devon Dean, you should be embarrassed.
I wrote this after I saw the portal the other day:
For the first time, Fort Bragg residents have been offered a limited glimpse into how these surveillance cameras are actually being used. What the data reveals should concern every member of this community.
-The Usage Data Shows That “Safeguards” Against Abuse Are Not Working-
According to the portal, the Fort Bragg Police Department conducted 55 searches of the Flock database in just the past 30 days. Of these searches:
* 23 were labeled simply as “investigation” (often misspelled or truncated as “invest”),
* 6 were listed as “identification,” “stolen,” or other similarly vague descriptors.
Flock Safety and FBPD have repeatedly claimed that officers must provide a “valid reason” before performing a search. Yet the term “investigation” is so broad as to be meaningless, it could justify virtually anything. This is not a safeguard; it is an illusion of oversight. The portal’s own data demonstrates that the protections residents were promised are either ineffective or not being enforced.
– Claims About ICE Access Are Contradicted by the Portal Itself Police Chief-
Chief Eric Swift has publicly stated that ICE cannot access Fort Bragg’s ALPR data. However, the Flock Safety Portal shows a long list of external agencies with access to our data, including multiple departments across California that, according to public reporting, have previously cooperated with federal immigration enforcement and have faced scrutiny for doing so.
Among the agencies with current access to Flock data are the Humboldt County Sheriff’s Office, Los Angeles Police Department, Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, San Diego County Sheriff’s Department, Merced County Sheriff’s Office, Riverside County Sheriff’s Department, and Orange County Sheriff’s Department. All of these agencies have been shown to share Flock data with ICE in the past. There is no guarantee that they haven’t continued to do so. These are only the agencies we know of because they’ve been caught sharing this data, there’s no way to know how many other agencies are engaging in this data-sharing surreptitiously.
Given this, it is evident that even if ICE does not receive data directly from Fort Bragg, it can access residents’ location information indirectly through partner agencies already linked to the Flock network. The presence of these agencies in our sharing network makes local claims of “no ICE access” misleading at best.
-Flock Cameras Make Us Unsafe-
The information made public this week confirms what many residents have feared: the Flock system is neither transparent nor meaningfully constrained. Its search-logging requirements are vague, its oversight mechanisms appear inadequate, and its data-sharing network exposes Fort Bragg residents to the very risks city leadership has insisted do not exist.
These cameras need to be removed from our community immediately!
What a lame article. By “award winning writer” Devon Dean? Award winning for what? Advertising? Children’s books? This sounds more like a sales pitch for Flock, or a butt-kiss for the “interim” Chief of Police, not a report. What happened to journalism? “Mendo Voice” ain’t it.
Stop lying. We need more in depth reporting, not copy and pasted press releases. Now is your chance for more rewards Devon, with a hit story where you catch these cops looking bad by relying on major publications for your facts instead of taking the word of these tech illiterate, small town cops. They are creepy as hell for spying on innocent people.
These are AI Surveillance cameras that FBPD have, and they are used by ICE. They don’t solve crimes. They create problems. FBPD’s safety portal says they share data all over California. Anyone in a police department in California can just hand over all the data to ice at any point, and that has been happening, only busted in Washingtion recently where ICE has a listserv full of MAGA cops who don’t care about department policy and like sharing things with their buddies in ICE.
This data is powerful and the abuses are numerous and the whole thing with the AI processing the data into summaries of everyone’s travel behavior is warrantless surveillance in violation of the constitution and it’s checks and balances. Flock login codes have been for sale on the dark web. Officers abusing their power have been caught using these to stalk their exes, corporate espionage, feeding all data to ICE via listservs, with so much more being discovered every day. Border patrol has been hiding these cameras in traffic cones! You can’t make this stuff up!
And yet FBPD is ready to make stuff up. They like their fancy toys! They don’t want to be left out of the club! They hold the Palantir stone! They are watching, always, without watching, as they process all of our data through ecological disasters known as data centers. This data aggregates into powerful stuff that will be used against us, one way or another.
Don’t forget, cops in this county have been busted robbing people on the highway! And they paid for these cameras with civil forfeiture money!
The Police Chief said at a recent City Council meeting, regarding Flocks: “These aren’t A.I. cameras.” What kind of utter B.S. is this? It obvious that it’s not the cameras themselves thatrt are A.I., it’s how the DATA is used. If this guy is willing to baldly lie about this, everything else he says is suspect.