We promised you good news, so here it is: the City’s administration has decided to terminate its contract with Flock. Flock’s cameras are scheduled to be shut off citywide this Monday August 24. We are grateful to the City’s administration for moving swiftly and decisively against Flock.
Unfortunately, we have bad news too.
The City of Santa Barbara is deep into discussions with a different company, Verkada Inc., to provide the City with replacement ALPR technology. At this moment, we don’t know much about Verkada. We know that Verkada has a history of violating email privacy laws to aggressively market its technology. We know that Verkada employees have used Verkada’s own technology to sexually harass other employees in Verkada’s own workplace. We know that Verkada’s technology has proven vulnerable to hacking, resulting in the disclosure of sensitive personal information on hundreds of thousands of people.
We also know that Verkada partners with other vendors of mass surveillance and police state technology, including a company called Axon. Axon is no better than Flock. Axon has a significant partnership with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), providing them with tasers and body cameras as part of a $220 million contract. Axon won this contract shortly after Trump purchased somewhere between $1 million and $5 million of Axon stock. More disturbing still: Axon provides TASER certification to the Director of Training for a company called Compliant Technologies, the makers of the gloves ICE is buying so that its agents can deliver painful electric shocks to anyone within reach.
We learned about the City’s choice of Verkada less than 24 hours ago. And we received an announcement just this afternoon that the City “will be switching to [Verkada] technology.” To which we say, WHOA! We have something to say before the City commits to Verkada. So does the rest of the community. So does City Council.
We don’t want to see Flock replaced by a company like Verkada. However, we can’t concentrate only on the behavior of these sellers of mass surveillance technology. There’s a larger point here, focused on the technology itself. There are now more than 120,000 ALPR cameras nationwide, and the data they capture can and has been abused: for example, by police officers threatening former domestic partners or harassing their critics, There are documented cases of ALPR technology making errors reading license plates, resulting in innocent families being pulled over at gunpoint and children being handcuffed. A Texas police officer was discovered using a nationwide ALPR search to find a woman suspected of having an abortion.
This Tuesday August 25 at approximately 2 pm, the Council will meet to consider the Flock termination and the replacement of Flock with Verkada. We say YES to kicking Flock out, and NO to replacing them with Verkada. Verkada’s technology poses an unacceptable risk of abuse, PARTICULARLY as it is likely to be used against MAGA’s usual targets: immigrants, activists and people of color.
Even those on the Council who might see a benefit to this technology should oppose approving the City’s rushing into a contract with Verkada before doing its due diligence. The pending deal with Verkada may be every bit as bad as the one we just ended with Flock.
Here’s how you can make your views known to City Council:
IN-PERSON. City Council meets in its chambers on the second floor of City Hall, 735 Anacapa Street. Please arrive by or close to the meeting start time, 2 pm on August 25, fill out a “Request to Speak” form (you want to speak on Agenda Item 5) and submit it to the City Manager Kelly McAdoo near the front left of the room. You will normally be given three minutes to speak, but be ready in case the mayor cuts our speaking time to one or two minutes. NOTE: we encourage you to attend the Council meeting even if you do not plan to give a comment.
REMOTE PUBLIC COMMENT: You can attend the Council meeting via Zoom and give a public comment remotely. To do so, you need to join the Zoom broadcast of the meeting and “raise your hand” by selecting the virtual hand icon in Zoom when public comment is called for ITEM 5 on the Agenda. The keyboard shortcut for raising your hand is Alt+Y for Windows and Option+Y for Macs. City staff will activate your microphone when your name is called, at which point you’ll need to unmute your microphone. The Zoom link to this Council meeting is here: https://santabarbaraca-gov.zoom.us/j/89359334270.
WRITTEN PUBLIC COMMENT: You can submit a public comment via email to Clerk@SantaBarbaraCA.gov prior to the beginning of the Council Meeting. All public comments submitted via email will be provided to City Council and will become part of the public record. Please note in your email that you are commenting on Agenda Item 5.
Additional information (including how to access and comment in Spanish) is available on the meeting agenda here.
Here’s our last word: if the City collects data on our whereabouts, there’s a risk the data ends up in the possession of Trump and his team. We cannot afford that risk. Please join us Tuesday at 2 pm at City Hall, to help us deliver this message.
