How to find out more

Share this site

If you use social media, share this site when it makes sense. Facebook, Nextdoor, or whatever platform you use is fine. A post to a neighborhood group or the people in your community goes a long way.

Five minutes

1. Find the cameras near you

   Check the Camera Map page for your area. If the map is missing a camera you already know about, adding it takes about two minutes and improves the picture for everyone.

2. Check the other lookup tools

   Nothing here requires special access. Four more places worth a few minutes each:

   • The Flock Transparency Portal. The links for individual cities are listed on the Sonoma County page where available. Flock publishes one transparency portal per agency at transparency.flocksafety.com/<agency>, for example santa-rosa-ca-pd and petaluma-ca-pd. These are Flock's own numbers, which makes them hard for a local city to dispute.
   • Check Eyes on Flock, which aggregates those portals and makes changes over time visible.
   • Search CEQAnet, the state's California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) filing system, at ceqanet.lci.ca.gov for "Flock." Santa Rosa filed a Notice of Exemption there in April 2026, and installations leave a paper trail there that rarely makes the news.
   • Search your city's past council agendas and budgets for original contract information. It typically shows up as a line item, often on a consent agenda where it passed without discussion.

3. Send one thing to one person

   Pick one fact that matters to someone you know and send it to them. A camera near their neighborhood. The amount their city is spending. Who can access the data. A documented case of misuse. One specific fact is more likely to start a conversation than a general warning about surveillance.

4. Ask one question

   Send your city council member, police department, or county supervisor one simple question:

   How many Flock cameras does our agency operate or have access to, who can search the data, and how often are those searches audited?

   You don't need to make an argument. Just ask the question, and save the answer.

An evening

1. File a public records request

   Under the California Public Records Act you do not need a lawyer, a stated reason, or residency in the jurisdiction to request information. Use the records request template to ask for the documents that show how your city uses Flock cameras.

   Keep every response, including the unhelpful ones. How an agency answers a records request is itself part of the public record.

2. Write to the people who vote on it

   If your city is buying, renewing, or expanding Flock cameras, write to the people who are voting on it. Keep it short, sign your name, and mention the specific agenda item. An email message is fine.

   You don't need to write a speech or become an expert. Ask one or two questions that matter to you: How many cameras are being added? Who can search the data? How is misuse detected? How much will taxpayers pay?

   Five identical form letters are easy to dismiss. Two genuine messages from constituents asking specific questions are harder to ignore, and your message becomes part of the public record.

3. Ask in a public meeting

   Public comment is usually two to three minutes and requires nothing but showing up. In this case, expertise is not required, just your curiosity. A specific question tends to produce a more useful answer than general objections. Your interest will speak volumes.

   Ask Questions collects them, grouped by what they are getting at: who controls the records, who can search them, how long they are kept, what they reveal, what the program costs, and whether it can be stopped. For the Santa Rosa Police Department there are also questions drawn from what SRPD has published about itself.

   In Sonoma County the relevant bodies are the Board of Supervisors (for the Sheriff's Office) and your own city council:

   Body	Regular meetings
   Sonoma County Board of Supervisors for the Sheriff's Office	Tuesdays, 8:30 am
   Santa Rosa City Council	Tuesdays, ≥2×/month, ~4 pm dates vary; check the calendar
   Petaluma City Council	1st & 3rd Mon
   Petaluma Public Safety Advisory Committee took up license plate readers Feb 2026	varies; check the meetings page
   Rohnert Park City Council	2nd & 4th Tue, 5:30 pm
   Healdsburg City Council	1st & 3rd Mon, 6:00 pm
   Windsor Town Council	1st & 3rd Wed, 6:00 pm
   City of Sonoma City Council	1st & 3rd Wed, 6:00 pm
   Sebastopol City Council	1st & 3rd Tue, 6:00 pm
   Cotati City Council	2nd & 4th Tue time not posted
   Cloverdale City Council	2nd & 4th Wed, 6:00 pm

   Schedules shift around holidays and recesses. Confirm the date on the agency's own calendar before you plan to attend.

Longer term

1. Surveillance oversight ordinances

   A number of cities have adopted ordinances requiring that any surveillance technology receive a public hearing, a written use policy, and an annual public report before it is acquired. These are often called CCOPS ordinances, for Community Control Over Police Surveillance, and they have passed in cities of widely different size and political character. They do not ban the technology; they require that its adoption be visible. Existing text from a neighboring jurisdiction is usually the practical starting point.

2. This is not a partisan issue

   Concern about these systems does not split cleanly along party lines. The people who turn up to meetings on it include civil libertarians, gun owners, immigrant families, church groups, engineers, budget hawks, and domestic violence advocates, who tend to arrive at the same questions from very different starting points.

3. Contract renewal dates

   Contracts renew on schedule and usually without discussion. The renewal date is the point at which a decision is formally revisited, which makes it the most useful date to know and the easiest one to miss.

Organizations working on this

• Electronic Frontier Foundation : deep technical and legal analysis, plus the Atlas of Surveillance.
• ACLU: state affiliates often track and litigate local surveillance directly.
• DeFlock: volunteer mapping of ALPR camera locations nationwide.
• Electronic Privacy Information Center : policy and regulatory work.
• MuckRock: files and publishes public records requests; useful for seeing what other people already got.

California and Bay Area

• ACLU of Northern California : the affiliate covering Sonoma County. Has litigated and organized on SB 34 compliance.
• Oakland Privacy: the group whose records requests produced the evidence behind the CalMatters reporting on illegal federal sharing. They know how to get these documents.
• Eyes on Flock: aggregates Flock's own per-agency transparency portals so you can watch camera counts and retention settings change over time.