This coming Tuesday the City Council will discuss two big items: the ongoing controversy over the city’s contract with Flock Safety, and the potential ballot initiative to raise certain taxes. And while I love talking about taxes, let’s take a time out and talk about these dang cameras.

I covered a fair amount of the background to this item as part of my Open Mic Nights series. However, there has been one significant development since that post: the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD), the largest municipal law enforcement agency in California, allowed its Flock Safety contract to lapse over privacy and data security concerns. Then, the LAPD announced that it was renegotiating that contract to address these concerns, rather than ending the relationship altogether.

Now, it’s Costa Mesa’s turn. Local press is getting pretty excited about it, and City leaders on both sides of the debate have encouraged their supporters to either defend or fight Flock.

So, where will the Flock contract go?

My guess is that the city will keep its contract, if only because the Costa Mesa Police Department has thrown its full weight behind it. In an Agenda Report that reads more like a Flock stock prospectus than an objective staff memo, the CMPD extolls Flock’s virtues, minimizes its flaws, and poohpoohs the possibility of engaging other companies in its place. “No alternative ALPR vendor has replicated Flock’s established California investigative network of more than 30,000 cameras,” the Agenda Report gushes.

Unfortunately, all this cheerleading is remarkably tone deaf. Flock’s many thousands of AI-enabled cameras are exactly what activists are concerned about. Additionally, in its haste to tell the City Council why they are so great, the CMPD inadvertently emphasizes exactly why these cameras might one day go much farther than they do today. While Flock cameras are sold as mere “automated license plate readers,” the CMPD excitedly tells us that Flock system allows law enforcement to record and log far more information. These cameras can record and identify the make, model, of a car, as well as its accessories and even its particular dings and scratches. When paired with AI, I don’t think it’s a stretch to believe that, in a pinch, the CMPD or another law enforcement agency could use the same powerful cameras to recognize and track people, too.

Don’t think that’s likely? Well, I’ve been traveling in Japan for the last week or so, there are cameras everywhere. Japan has relied on its network of license plate readers, called the “N System”, to deter vehicle-based crime for almost 40 years. And guess what they are piloting today? You guessed it: AI-powered facial recognition cameras. The justification? To find missing children and elderly people, they assure everyone. The mission creep, especially when people become accustomed to constant survelliance, can be very real.

But don’t worry, says the CMPD, because this kind of expansion or other abuses of the system simply aren’t possible. “Per our policies and State law, our ALPR system can only be used for legitimate law enforcement purposes and will never be utilized for immigration enforcement or for any purpose not specific to the enforcement of California laws.” But, goofily, the Agenda Reports admits to exactly this kind of abuse happening recently both within the CMPD and in other agencies. Costa Mesa’s policies and State law have not changed in the interim. So parroting back the legal framework that has allowed documented abuses to occur is pretty cold comfort. It’s like telling people not to worry about the uptick in the burglary rate because burglarly is, after all, against the law.

And therein lies the significant difference between the nascent US mass vehicle surveillance system and those in other countries. In my example country of Japan, yes, the cameras are everywhere. But they are ALL controlled by the state. The state is bound by ordinances, statutes and constitutional provisions that are determined by a democratic process — and state actors can be punished by democratic process, too.

Here, the cameras and the data collected by them are effectively controlled by a private company, and the limitations on those private companies are controlled by contract. Sure, if a police officer abuses the Flock system, she can be fired. But what happens if Flock violates its contract? Will the CMPD really part ways with a company when, in its words, doing so would “represent a significant reduction in the Police Department’s investigative abilities”? It probably wouldn’t. So the accountability levers just aren’t there.

If the Flock contract does go down, then, my bet is that it will be because the CMPD’s attempt to oversell Flock puts a bad taste in the City Council’s mouth. It certainly hasn’t reassured me.

Is Flock the new “stop and frisk”?

Not every useful law enforcement tool stands up to long-term scrutiny. In the 2000s, the New York Police Department (NYPD) started using the so-called “stop and frisk” tactic, whereby NYPD officers were encouraged to stop individuals based only on a “reasonable suspicion” of crime and question them. If those questions led to an officer believing the individual may possess a weapon, that individual could be frisked as well.

At the time, the tactic had a number of vocal supporters, including then-Mayor Michael Bloomberg. Even today, many (more conservative) commentators and politicians wistfully recall the benefits of “stop and frisk”, including former New York City resident President Donald Trump, former NYPD (and LAPD) Commissioner Bill Bratton, and former NYC Mayor Eric Adams.

However, after significant outcry — and lawsuits — from civil rights organizations, “stop and frisk” as it was practiced in New York City has since been declared unconstitutional. Although the tactic is facially neutral, in practice, stop-and-frisk was used primarily against minority populations, particularly Blacks and Hispanics, at a rate significantly higher than the overall population. Today, thanks in part to these losses in court as well as setbacks in public opinion, the practice is significantly diminished.

And therein may lie the tragedy. It is very possible that stop-and-frisk really was a useful crime fighting tactic, and certainly many within and around the NYPD championed it. But any useful tool that asks for significant public sacrifice — in that case, the willingness to be stopped for practically any reason, and at much higher rates in minority communities — but doesn’t come with democratically agreed safeguards and limitations on its use, is likely doomed to long-term failure. Not only will it become subject to continual legal challenges, it will also eventually lose in the courtroom of public opinion.

From my perspective, that seems to be where Flock is going. Like stop-and-frisk, the rapid proliferation of Flock cameras is asking for a lot from the public. Americans are not accustomed to being watched 24/7, and certainly not by cameras with practically unlimited potential to identify and track targets. And, again like stop-and-frisk, politicians don’t seem eager to get ahead of the oncoming public backlash by preemptively putting in guardrails.

It is entirely possible that stop-and-frisk as a practice could have been saved, both legally and in terms of public regard, if boosters like Mayor Bloomberg had championed strong safeguards on stop-and-frisk rather than imperiously dismissing its detractors’ legitimate concerns. By trying to ram unlimited stop-and-frisk through on public safety grounds, Bloomberg and others likely doomed the tactic altogether by failing to curb its excesses and reassure the public about its limitations. Flock cameras could suffer exactly the same fate if politicians don’t wise up and realize that, if they don’t limit their own power, the people will take it away from them entirely.

What Costa Mesa should do instead: Use Flock, but don’t dismiss its problems

As I said at the top, I think the city’s Flock contract will survive for now based on pure CMPD insistence. But the system is absolutely in a precarious position. Removing the cameras will certainly be a rallying cry for the upcoming election, and if the ball bounces the wrong way, those cameras very well could come down.

So if city leadership (including the CMPD) want to preserve this tool for the long run, it should take the Flock critiques seriously. I think that starts by crafting a policy — driven in substance by the City Council — around the city’s future use of AI-enabled cameras for law enforcement purposes.

First, such a policy should determine what AI-enabled cameras can and can’t be used to do, even when there is an arguable public-safety justification for exceeding those limitations. It has to be assumed that technology is only going to advance, and that any camera installed will eventually be able to identify, track and transmit data about anything it can see. That includes people, pets, personal belongings, children, anything. Such a powerful tool requires clear, inviolable, and publicly agreed upon rules.

Second, such a policy should sketch out the parameters that any private company providing these services must meet in order to contract with the city. Due to network effects accounting for almost the entire economic value of its system, Flock needs access to Costa Mesa’s cameras almost as much as Costa Mesa wants access to Flock. The City should use that leverage — leverage that is now at its height thanks to recent defections by other cities — to insist that real safeguards and actual penalties for abuse are put in place.

“It is important,” George Washington spoke during his famous farewell address, “that the habits of thinking in a free Country should inspire caution in those entrusted with its administration, to confine themselves within their respective Constitutional spheres; avoiding in the exercise of the Powers of one department to encroach upon another.” Without such confinement, power can be beautiful; but it will also be unethical, or worse, dangerous. Deciding whether a tool is useful to investigating crimes is absolutely within the power and expertise of the CMPD. But placing limitations on using that tool is absolutely within the authority of the City Council and, more fundamentally, the People of Costa Mesa. To allow the CMPD to be the judge of both is corrosive: first to the public trust, and then to liberty itself.