Recent discussions surrounding public safety and technology have brought a quiet reality to light: Automated License Plate Readers (ALPRs)—including systems manufactured by Flock Safety—and private surveillance networks are expanding across Davis. While often marketed as simple crime prevention or parking tools, their proliferation poses serious risks to our civil liberties and community trust.
While local law enforcement maintains they do not own or operate these specific cameras, private entities throughout our commercial corridors and business properties increasingly utilize them. Because these private systems can tie into broader regional data-sharing networks, the boundaries between private security and law enforcement surveillance blur.
Every vehicle passing by is logged, timestamped and potentially shared across statewide databases without public debate or oversight.
What makes this technology particularly alarming is how easily it tracks everywhere you go. Once your license plate is scanned, these systems do more than take a single snapshot—they build a continuous, searchable history of your daily movements.
By aggregating data across multiple camera locations, third parties and law enforcement networks can map your routines, frequented locations, social associations and travel patterns over time, turning everyday driving into an unbroken log of your personal life.
Furthermore, the creation of these massive, centralized digital footprints opens up terrifying security vulnerabilities. If hackers or bad actors breach these surveillance databases, they gain a real-time roadmap to our private lives.
Malicious actors could potentially monitor these logs to see when you leave for work, where you are at a given hour, whether your house is empty and when you are returning home—turning a tool supposedly meant for “safety” into a blueprint for residential burglary and stalking.
This hidden tracking creates a profound “chilling effect.” Vulnerable populations—including community members seeking sensitive services or health care—may hesitate to access vital public spaces out of fear that their movements are being permanently recorded and exposed.
See for Yourself
Residents can check how widespread these tracking systems are in our own neighborhoods:
DeFlock (deflock.org): A volunteer-driven, open-source map built on OpenStreetMap that tracks automated license plate readers and cameras globally. You can use it to inspect camera locations, lens directions and installations right here in Davis.
Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF): Provides resources and guides on how automated license plate readers threaten public privacy and how communities can push back.
We cannot allow Davis to drift into normalized, ubiquitous tracking under the guise of security. Our city leadership must require public transparency audits and enact stricter local oversight on private-public surveillance sharing.
Public safety and personal privacy do not have to be mutually exclusive.
Mike Curro
Davis
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