Who Is
Watching?

My name is [your name], I'm a resident of Grass Valley, and I'm not here as a lawyer or a policy expert but as someone who lives here, drives here, and is raising [my family / my kids] here, and I want to thank this council for ending the Flock contract, because you listened to people like me and you acted.

I want to be honest about why I'm still here, though, because the thing that bothered me most was never the cameras themselves; it was that nobody asked us. There was no town hall, no ballot measure, and no public hearing where the question of whether our city should be plugged into a national surveillance network was put to the people who would actually be surveilled by it, and most of us only found out about any of it because a neighbor filed a public records request.

For a couple of years, every time I drove past one of those cameras I was photographed, and my plate, my vehicle, my route, and the time and date of my trip were logged into a private company's database, not because I was suspected of anything but simply because I drove down a public road, and that is the kind of blanket surveillance that the Fourth Amendment was written to forbid.

Some will say "if you've done nothing wrong, you have nothing to hide," and I would ask them whether they lock their front door at night or close their curtains, not because they are hiding crimes but because protecting a private life is a basic right, and it is a right that gets handed away quietly whenever a contract like this one is signed without the public in the room.

So my ask is simple, and it is really about who gets to decide. Please pass a Community Control Over Police Surveillance ordinance, so that the next time someone offers this city a surveillance system it has to come to you in public instead of arriving as a signature on a contract residents discover years later. Please ban facial recognition outright, because a camera that knows my face is a different thing from a camera that reads a plate, and I do not want to live somewhere I can be identified by name every time I walk downtown. And please refuse any system where a private company owns the equipment or holds the data, because no one at this city chose to send our records to federal agencies; a vendor did that, and the contract let it happen.

You already did the hard part by ending the contract, and I am asking you to make sure that decision holds for whoever sits in these seats next. Thank you.

My name is [your name], I'm a resident of Grass Valley, and I want to thank this council for terminating Grass Valley PD's contract with Flock Safety, because that was the right call and it was not an easy one. I'm here tonight to ask you to protect that decision by writing three rules into city law.

It is worth remembering what the records showed, because that is the case for all three. Grass Valley PD's cameras were searched over 7.5 million times by outside agencies, with more than five million of those searches coming from agencies outside California, in direct violation of California Civil Code Section 1798.90.55(b), and the agencies querying us included a federal fusion center, the Postal Inspection Service, Air Force bases, and the Naval Criminal Investigative Service.

The data also includes 1,175 searches by Homeland Security Investigations, Customs and Border Protection, and the Border Patrol, every one of them after the California Attorney General explicitly prohibited that sharing in October 2023, along with more than 54,000 searches with no valid reason given. Not one of those facts reached the public through the city; residents pieced them together from records requests they filed themselves.

The first rule is a Community Control Over Police Surveillance ordinance, which would require that the council approve any new surveillance technology in a public hearing before it is acquired or deployed, that every system have a written use policy covering who may access the data, for what purposes, and how long it is retained, and that the department publish an annual report on how each technology was actually used and who the data was shared with; none of that is novel, since Oakland, Berkeley, Davis, and San Francisco have all adopted ordinances along these lines.

The second rule is an outright ban on facial recognition, not a use policy and not a restriction, because face surveillance identifies people by their bodies rather than their license plates, it misidentifies women and people of color at measurably higher rates, and San Francisco, Oakland, Berkeley, and Santa Cruz have already decided that no set of guardrails makes it acceptable in a free city.

The third rule is that this city will not deploy surveillance equipment owned or controlled by a private company, meaning the city owns the hardware, the data lives on city systems, and no vendor decides who else may search it. That is the direct lesson of the Flock records, because no one in this room voted to send our data to the ATF or to Border Patrol; a private company did, and the contract permitted it.

So I am asking the council to direct staff to bring forward an ordinance covering all three rules, to publicly disclose the reason fields withheld from our records requests, and, now that the cameras themselves are down, to confirm on the record that the vendor's copy of everything they collected here has been deleted. Thank you.

My name is [your name], I'm a resident of Nevada County, and I'm here to ask the Board to use its budget authority to defund the Sheriff's contract with Flock Safety.

Public records obtained through the California Public Records Act show that the Flock cameras owned by the Nevada County Sheriff's Office have been searched over 13 million times by 4,654 different outside agencies, with more than five million of those searches coming from agencies outside California, which directly violates California Civil Code Section 1798.90.55(b).

Flock also publishes a "transparency portal" that the Sheriff's Office points residents to, which claims about 130 searches happen in a 30-day window, while our records covering the same window show 271,577 searches, an undercount of two thousand times.

More than 80 communities have already ended their Flock contracts, with Santa Cruz becoming the first city in California to do so, and we are asking Nevada County to be the next. Thank you.

My name is [your name], I'm a resident of Nevada County, and I'm not here as a lawyer or a policy expert but as someone who lives here, drives here, and is raising [my family / my kids] here, which is why I want to talk about what it means that the Sheriff's Flock cameras went up without ever asking the people of this county.

There was no town hall, no ballot measure, and no public hearing where the question of whether our county should be plugged into a national surveillance network was put to the people who would actually be surveilled by it; instead, the contract was signed, the cameras went up, and most of us only found out about any of it because someone filed a public records request.

The bigger issue, though, isn't even how the decision was made, but what these cameras actually do, because every time I drive past one I am photographed and my plate, my vehicle, my route, and the time and date of my trip are all logged into a private company's database, not because I am suspected of any crime but simply because I drove down a public road, and that is the literal definition of a general warrant that the Fourth Amendment was written to forbid.

Some will say "if you've done nothing wrong, you have nothing to hide," and I would ask them whether they lock their front door at night or close their curtains, not because they are hiding crimes but because protecting a private life is a basic right that license plate readers strip away from every resident, without consent, without a warrant, and without any real chance to object.

None of this is theoretical, either, because ALPR data has been used elsewhere to track domestic violence victims to safe houses, to misidentify innocent drivers in ways that have led to guns-drawn traffic stops, and here in Nevada County it has been handed over to dozens of federal and out-of-state agencies that California law specifically forbids from receiving it, all of which is to say that this technology has not made our county safer but has only made us watched.

I am asking the Board to use the authority you do have, which is your control over this office's budget, to defund the Flock contract, and to restore the basic principle that in this country the government cannot follow you everywhere unless it has a specific reason to. Thank you.

My name is [your name], I'm a resident of Nevada County, and I'm here this morning because over the past year our county has been quietly plugged into a national surveillance network operated by a private company called Flock Safety, which is something most residents have no idea happened, and I am asking this Board to look at the public records yourselves and use your budget authority to end this contract.

Since installation, the Flock cameras owned by the Nevada County Sheriff's Office have been searched over 13 million times by 4,654 different outside agencies, with more than five million of those searches coming from agencies outside California, which is a direct violation of California Civil Code Section 1798.90.55(b), the state law that prohibits sharing automated license plate reader data with any non-California entity.

The agencies in our data include over eight thousand searches by the ATF in Nashville and Louisville, hundreds of searches by the FBI, more than three thousand searches by the United States Postal Inspection Service, and queries from Langley Air Force Base, Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, the Naval Criminal Investigative Service, and the National Park Service, none of which are California agencies and none of which have any clear jurisdiction over Nevada County.

Flock also publishes what it calls a "transparency portal" that the Sheriff's Office points residents to, and that portal claims roughly 130 searches happened in a typical 30-day window, while our public records covering the exact same 30-day window show 271,577 searches, an undercount of roughly two thousand times, with every "reason" field in the released audit logs stripped before they ever reached the public.

More than 80 communities have ended their Flock contracts in the past year, including Santa Cruz, which became the first city in California to do so by a 6-to-1 council vote, Mountain View, which followed unanimously in February, and South Pasadena, Cambridge, Denver, Austin, and Eugene, all of which have walked away.

The Sheriff is independently elected and this Board cannot order her to do anything, but you control her budget, and I am asking you to do three things: defund the Flock Safety line item in the next budget cycle, pass a resolution publicly calling on the Sheriff to terminate the contract, and demand the public disclosure of every reason field and search log that was withheld from our public records requests. Thank you.