City Council Votes
| District #. Councilmember | May 7 Special Meeting1 |
|---|---|
| 1. Rashi Kesarwani | ❌ Extend Flock Contract |
| 2. Terry Taplin | ❌ Extend Flock Contract |
| 3. Ben Bartlett | ✅️ No Contract Renewal |
| 4. Igor Tregub | ✅️ No Contract Renewal |
| 5. Shoshana O’Keefe | ❌ Extend Flock Contract |
| 6. Brent Blackaby | ❌ Extend Flock Contract |
| 7. Cecilia Lunaparra | ✅️ No Contract Renewal |
| 8. Mark Humbert | ❌ Extend Flock Contract |
| Mayor Adena Ishii | ✅️ No Contract Renewal |
Council Meeting Recaps
The Special City Council Meeting on May 7 was scheduled after the Council failed to come to a decision on a $2 million expansion of the City’s contract for surveillance with Flock Safety during the March 24 Regular City Council Meeting.2 The city was considering an expansion of mass surveillance to include:
- Drones as first responders and for aerial mass surveillance
- Pan-tilt-zoom (PTZ) cameras for surveilling pedestrians
- Integration of private surveillance cameras from local businesses into a Flock-managed, AI-powered platform, then known as Flock Nova
- Flock Nova would also centralize evidence and records data from the Berkeley Police Department along with all ALPR and PTZ images
Note that these are the very same technologies that the City is still seeking through the outstanding Request for Proposals!
Council failed to come to a decision on March 24 in part because of massive dissent from the community: well over a hundred public comments pushed the meeting into the wee hours of the morning, concluding at 1:30 AM. In addition to in-person and zoom comments — the vast majority in strong opposition to Flock — at least 239 email comments were sent ahead of the meeting. These comments were 90% against Flock!
Council originally decided to postpone the decision expanding the contract with Flock to a Special City Council meeting on June 2. This date was rescheduled with little notice to May 7. Despite the short notice, hundreds of people communicated with Council prior to and during the meeting. Again, the supermajority of 467 email comments were opposed to Flock. More than half of the comments in support of Flock came from non-Berkeley residents. Similarly, with over 150 in-person speakers, only 5 spoke in favor of Flock. The Berkeley community does not want mass surveillance!
In the face of the massive outpouring of community objection to surveillance, Council chose not to expand the contract with Flock. Nevertheless, a slim majority of 5 Councilmembers voted to renew the existing contract with Flock for 52 ALPRs.
Leaked City Attorney Memo
Two days before the May 7 Special City Council Meeting, the Daily Cal reported on a 31-page memo leaked from the City Attorney’s office, which highlighted several glaring concerns about the existing and prospective surveillance contracts with Flock.
Notably, the memo explicitly acknowledges that contract language has little bearing on whether or not surveillance data entrusted to a third party can actually remain secure:
we want to caution that we cannot ensure Flock will abide by its contractual obligations, no matter the strength and clarity of the contract language (pg. 7)
The memo also pointed out the major legal liability threatened by continued contracting with Flock, which the memo extends to the mass surveillance technologies in general:
This technology carries inherent legal risks that cannot be entirely mitigated. (pg. 17)
These legal risks span the gamut from technology use policies that don’t meet the requirements of the City’s own Surveillance Technology Ordinance to lawsuits claiming infringement of California sanctuary laws and Fourth Amendment privacy guarantees. While the memo focuses on the details of the proposed expansion of surveillance technology with Flock, the same arguments hold for these technologies through any provider.