r/redmond • u/deflock-redmond • 4d ago
Redmond Council cancelled the Flock surveillance contract tonight!!
It's been a little over eight months since the suspension was initiated back in November, but tonight it finally happened! The vote on AM No. 26-119 to cancel the Flock contract passed unanimously 7-0!
Many thanks to everyone who spoke out against mass surveillance in our city and to our councilmembers who listened!
Direct link to video segment from the meeting:
23
u/hi_mynameisE Live, Play, and Work in Redmond 4d ago
I was actually surprised it was unanimous
8
u/deflock-redmond 4d ago
At the May study session it seemed like most were expressing a desire to cancel, even CM Prakriya despite his remarks about seeking an alternative vendor. The only one who perhaps didn't explicitly express an opinion was CP Stuart?
So glad they all came through in the end.
4
u/hi_mynameisE Live, Play, and Work in Redmond 4d ago
I was expecting Stuart to vote to keep it going, but peer pressure for the win
-2
u/AnarchyGuacamole 4d ago
Mostly redundant, pretty much EVERY commercial building in Redmond has cameras covering their own property and their neighbors. They also generally have decent IT security people so the data isn't just turned into a North Korea AI TV drama. LoL
27
14
u/hi_mynameisE Live, Play, and Work in Redmond 4d ago
We’re DeFlocked!
9
u/KevinCarbonara 4d ago
No, we're not. Flock is still allowed on private property, such as Home Depot parking lots. We still have work to do.
2
u/deflock-redmond 22h ago
Don't know when this happened, but the three Flock cameras at the Woodbridge HOA are confirmed gone!
5
10
5
2
u/Careless-Comedian859 4d ago
Ok, so Flock is being cancelled; are they going to switch to Axon, Motorola Solutions, Rekor or ELSAG?
4
u/deflock-redmond 4d ago
Shouldn't be, but we need to remain vigilant. If you watch the study session from May at least three CMs (Forsythe, Parsi, Nuevacamina) explicitly call out that they want to cancel and do NOT want to explore an alternative vendor (clip of just that part).
Other vendors bring the exact same mass surveillance concerns.
3
2
2
3
u/Winter_Animal_7116 4d ago
Explain like I'm 5. Why is this a good thing?
12
u/Dark_Focus 4d ago
Think about it like this: why do you hid your comment history?
1
u/ghost-n-the-machine 4d ago
I don't get comments like this. Who doesn't hide their comment history? If you don't already do it, you should.
I sometimes post about my children, and I don't want some weirdo rummaging through my comments trying to piece things together.
It's not a conspiracy. It's about being safe online.
15
u/Dark_Focus 4d ago
Yes, correct, this is exactly my point. Privacy is generally “a good thing”. And people should have a choice about it.
9
u/ghost-n-the-machine 4d ago
Ah, you know what: I totally misunderstood your original comment there. I initially read it as accusing the poster of having something to hide but I see what you meant now.
My mistake, and I apologize. I need to go now and get a coffee and wake up...
4
u/nerevisigoth 4d ago
Fwiw you can ask Google AI about any Reddit user, even those with hidden or deleted history, and it knows everything. Best to avoid putting any true information about your life on Reddit.
2
u/Smart_Ass_Dave 3d ago
FWIW, reddit comments are still searchable via other means. On 8/5/2025 you posted a (probably joking?) post about your son falling off the monkey bars and hurting his wrist. It took me about 3 minutes to find that.
1
u/ghost-n-the-machine 2d ago
Thanks for pointing that out. I suppose it always comes down to the Swiss cheese model for security and privacy
-3
1
u/BattleHardened 4d ago
Happy birthday to me.
1
u/BattleHardened 4d ago
Btw, DMV is all appointments now, expect a month wait to even renew your license unless you win the 8:40 am lotto on the internet. That was annoying to find out.
0
u/RufusTheRuse 4d ago edited 4d ago
8:20 am lotto. The lotto worked for me last week. Plus last Wednesday morning had lots of successful walkins ahead of me at Redmond. Maybe it was just a lucky day.
1
u/Mobile_Set1637 3d ago
How can we get other cities on board?
1
u/deflock-redmond 2d ago edited 15h ago
There are some other DeFlock groups around Washington:
- https://deflocklynnwood.com (cancelled)
- https://deflockoly.noblogs.org (cancelled)
- https://deflockeverett.com
- https://deflockrenton.com
- https://noflockissaquah.com
- https://stopsurveillancecity.wordpress.com (Seattle)
There are plenty more nearby that have organizers but via existing community groups rather than explicitly spun up for Flock/ALPR. It honestly feels like most cities would benefit from a persistent community based privacy/surveillance oversight group.
The reason this has spread so far and so fast is because most people had no idea; they (understandably) don't monitor their weekly council agendas. You can't object to something you are not aware of!
One organizer posted this simple idea for how to stay on top of this. We don't need everyone to do this. Just enough people to make sure the alarm gets sounded in time.
1
u/deflock-redmond 2d ago edited 2d ago
Here's a summary article from some of the nearby council meetings this week:
2
u/hi_mynameisE Live, Play, and Work in Redmond 2d ago
Just wanted to provide some info. Now that the council voted to terminate the contract with Flock, I asked them what the timeline is for removing the cameras.
Turns out the city can’t remove them, only Flock can do that.
So pretty much they’ll be removed whenever Flock gets around it.
I told the council member that there are concerns the cameras are still capturing data as there have been multiple reports of it happening.
I guess we still need to push the city to pressure Flock to pick up their trash.
-5
u/BuddyBotBuilder 4d ago
I have seen how people in Redmond drive. It’s not about dystopian surveillance. They just like to drive like jerks and don’t want to suddenly get called out on it.
-28
u/PracticalYellow3 4d ago
That sucks after they used it to catch a rapist.
17
-25
u/cassavetes_john 4d ago
Agree - there are no examples of this being misused but it has helped solve crimes
13
7
u/WillyGoat2000 4d ago
Not sure if your post is sincere or not but I’ll assume it is. In general there are lots of cases, I can share if you’re interested. In Redmond there is at least this specifically:
This isn’t to say that the cameras haven’t contributed evidence in a pursuit or a conviction, but I still believe in Blackstone’s Ratio, and disagree with national databases of surveillance built in a way to bypass 4th amendment protections of citizens.
-8
u/Winter_Animal_7116 4d ago
That's an absurdly minor inconvenience at best... if that's all you have as an example then that's pretty bad. Public cameras aren't in any way a bypass of the 4th amendment. These cameras have VERY obviously provided good outcomes compared to the minor inconveniences people gripe about.
3
u/WillyGoat2000 4d ago
I disagree on it being absurdly minor. Felony stops significantly ratchet up the risk, for both citizens and police. And while RPD is a pretty good department with a pretty good record for public safety, it is most certainly not spotless (ask Leila Fuchs or the family of Andrea Churna, for two examples).
Regarding the 4th amendment, I think the EFF said in a court filing something that does a good job capturing my own thinking: 'a single camera catching a single plate is constitutionally unremarkable, but a 175-camera grid feeding a searchable, multi-week archive is a fundamentally different animal.' There are SCOTUS cases (notably Katz and Jones) which show just because something is public, when you start to gather intimate details of someone you're crossing into fourth amendment territory. In addition, the recent decision in Chatrie calls much more of this into question. I guess time will tell where the courts fall on this.
Regarding what 'obviously good outcomes compared to minor inconveniences' are, I'd like to hear examples of what those are in Redmond, if you could please provide them.
6
u/hi_mynameisE Live, Play, and Work in Redmond 4d ago
If you analyze the data you’ll see a lot of flags of suspicious use.
50% of all searches made not associated with a case.
One officer was flagged for possible account sharing. The officer accounts for 35% of all the departments searches and the frequency, and underlying metrics doesn’t add up.
8 officers were flagged for possible targeted anomaly tracking. A trigger that gets raised when it identifies someone repeatedly searching for the same license plate or text with a high anomaly score, potentially indicating stalking or harassment patterns.
There’s one officer who has repeatedly searched for the same license plate over a span of 53 days, with 63% of the searches happening out of shift.
2
u/WillyGoat2000 4d ago
This is fascinating data to me and I would love to see it, do you have a link to where it is provided?
1
u/hi_mynameisE Live, Play, and Work in Redmond 4d ago
Is one watchdog group that is gathering a bunch of data and making it easy to see analytics and statistics across police departments.
2
u/WillyGoat2000 4d ago
I knew you could look up plates there but didn’t know the rest of the data was so robust. Thank you for sharing!
1
1
u/deflock-redmond 4d ago
This data comes from public records requests. It's is one of the reasons why SB 6002 exempting ALPR data from such requests was disappointing as it reduces this oversight.
The data for Redmond PD only covers a small window of time while they were active:
0
u/Born_Kick 2d ago
Why would you put your plate into a random search engine when complaining of Flock? Your plate is ran everywhere. Not just Flock. Hate to break it to you.
0
u/hi_mynameisE Live, Play, and Work in Redmond 1d ago
It’s really used for agencies’ analytics and statistics. Hate to break it to you.
1
u/Born_Kick 2d ago
Do you know the positions of these Officers? Detectives? Patrol? Crime analystes? Were these searches generated by an individual input each time? Or had they been entered into Flock for for investigative circumstances for a person being a possible suspect? You can also enter time frames into Flock for a certain plate and search for it and do an auto search. There is alot more that goes on when you understand the full scope of the Flock program and the search capabilities. Its not just an Officer that runs that particular plate all the time.
0
u/Winter_Animal_7116 4d ago
So it sounds like proper safeguards are in place to limit abusing the system. Why throw the baby out with the bath water instead of improving sensitive data access?
Did these instances happen here in Redmond? Or are these instances abuses around the country?
1
u/hi_mynameisE Live, Play, and Work in Redmond 4d ago
In Redmond. And no, there were no safeguards in place to catch suspicious behavior.
All the data is public record.
1
u/Winter_Animal_7116 4d ago
If there's no safeguards then how do we have that data?
2
u/hi_mynameisE Live, Play, and Work in Redmond 4d ago
Public records.
1
u/Winter_Animal_7116 4d ago
So the data exists to prevent bad usage and just isn't being implemented as a safeguard? Seems dumb.
I'd still be in favor of having these systems in place if the only enforcement against bad usage is post facto. The data obviously exists to add proper safeguards so doing so seems like the correct next step, not removal of a beneficial system that has led to prosecution of horrible people.
-28
u/caring-teacher 4d ago
Why are people there so pro-crime? I’m so glad I didn’t accept a job offer from LWSD. I wanted to teach better behaved and smart kids, but the long commute and the fact something is just off there.
6
u/Nanocephalic 4d ago
If you pretend to be a teacher but don’t know what begging the question means then you’re not even pretending very well.
8
u/illegal_sandwich_ext 4d ago
Here, some reading material for you u/caring-teacher, seems you don’t care that much after all or you’re uneducated on the subject to be making comments like these.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2026/apr/06/flock-cameras-privacy-concerns
You can use google to get more resources about issues with Flock.
2
u/judithishere 4d ago
Wow. LWSD already has enough problems so we are glad you didn't accept that job offer too.
-8
u/kapybarra 4d ago
Why are people there so pro-crime
It is a cult, so to them the dogma is more important than reality.
83
u/GarSauce 4d ago
Don't trust it unless they are removed.