u/Silent_South5471

Last month our Mayor Danny Avula and Chief Edwards made a statement that the Richmond Police Department would be cutting off Flock access to any department in Virginia that also had a 287(g) sharing agreement with ICE. This is great and I am glad it happened, however it isn't even close to enough, and Danny knows that (we explained it to his face)

Flock cameras are insecure independent researchers and YouTubers are able to access entire Flock networks from their laptops. At the beginning of this year, a Richmond citizen was testifying to RVA city council that she was able to get her friend in another state to track her car in real time. Flock camera access is on sale to private investigators, and available online on Russian hacking websites to anyone who knows how to pay with bitcoin.

Consider the obvious problems with these cameras and their data being so insecure: Someone has an abusive or predatory ex, and it is easy to stalk them around the city. Robbers waiting for people to leave their house could wait for Flock hits on known owner vehicles before breaking in. Flock owned indoor cameras in young girls' gymnastics classes could be watched for hours at a time by any number of unknown individuals (which btw is is a real story).

Furthermore, ICE and DHS undoubtedly have their own backdoor access to these cameras. Also even worse, the city doesn't even own the data! Flock owns the data and regularly gives access to it upon request not even requiring subpoenas for it, they just give it away upon request.

https://youtu.be/vU1-uiUlHTo?

https://youtu.be/uB0gr7Fh6lY?

https://oberlinreview.org/37048/opinions/a-minnesotan-decries-ices-use-of-mass-surveillance/

https://www.aclu.org/news/national-security/tracking-alpr-cameras/surveillance-company-flock-now-using-ai-to-report-us-to-police-if-it-thinks-our-movement-patterns-are-suspicious

Mayor Danny Avula also loves to go on podcasts and put out press releases to attempt to “saturate the narrative" around the benefits of Flock. No one said the police state wouldn't be good at solving crimes. But we shouldn't be putting all of our effort into “solving crimes”, we should be preventing crimes in the first place!

We should take the millions of dollars that the city has put into Flock and invest it into community violence reduction programs like Baltimore and New York have done.

These cameras also predominantly spy on black and brown communities here’s a study on how prevalent this is..https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=6064548

We also have to question if the police state is even good at solving crimes. All of the “data” showing that Flock cameras help solve crime is anecdotal. Just last week I had the opportunity to attend a lecture by Steven T. Keener from the Department of Sociology, Social Work, and Anthropology at Christopher Newport University. It was a great event heres an article he wrote recently https://www.styleweekly.com/its-time-to-turn-off-the-flock-safety-cameras/

. Here also are links to some of his studies:

https://www.mdpi.com/2413-8851/10/5/270

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=6064548

His work showed that Flock cameras actually have a negative correlation with solving major crimes (outside of carjacking cases). We should not be so willing to give up our right to privacy, the 4th Amendment, and our safety in public to a technology that crime experts can't even say definitively helps solve crimes at scale.

Not even counting how often these cameras are abused by police to spy on their exes or on protesters. We only know about this because cops forgot to redact the information before submitting reports. Richmond was one of the cities where they tracked No Kings protesters' cars which by the way I would love an explanation on why my car was tracked.

https://ij.org/police-have-reportedly-used-license-plate-readers-to-stalk-romantic-interests-at-least-14-times-in-recent-years/

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/11/how-cops-are-using-flock-safetys-alpr-network-surveil-protesters-and-activists

Now let's talk about Peter Thiel, Trump, the CIA and the oligarchic police state they are attempting to set up. Why would they be funding and running giant police databases (palintier), police drones, police cameras, and other surveillance tools. There are obvious dangerous motivations behind these investments. Peter Theil is on record as saying he does not believe that democracy is compatible with the future he sees for the world. Let's not be using our tax dollars to fund his cameras in our neighborhoods.

“Flock’s initial venture capital came largely from members of the so-called “PayPal Mafia”: Former PayPal CEO Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund and several other Thiel associated firms, including Bedrock Capital, Y Combinator and Initialized Capital.” - Atlanta Community Press Collective

Obviously, Flock is only the beginning of the surveillance state that we have found ourselves in, but getting rid of these cameras is an achievable goal that can help to raise awareness about other surveillance tactics and dangers we face

So anyway, if you want to get involved and stop allowing ICE to track people with your tax dollars, check out the deflock campaigns in RVA: https://linktr.ee/RDSA\_Migrant\_Solidarity

Chesterfield, and I'm sure there is one in Henrico, but it is not known to me.

we will steal some of these U-Haul trucks (short for You Haul) And we will raid stuff with them