A camera on the 62
wrote this about you.

Two sections of the Civil Code do most of the work here, and neither is controversial.

Section 1798.90.51 requires any agency operating these cameras to publish a usage and privacy policy, and to audit its searches[15].

Section 1798.90.55 restricts sharing that data with out-of-state and federal agencies[16].

These are not aspirations. The state Attorney General sued the City of El Cajon in 2025 over out-of-state sharing[17], and the ACLU and EFF identified more than 70 California agencies doing the same thing[18].

So the first question is not political. It is administrative:where is our policy, and where is our audit? If the Town or the Sheriff's Department cannot produce them, that is a compliance problem the Council has to fix regardless of how anyone feels about surveillance.

In January 2026 a federal judge held that Norfolk's network was not a Fourth Amendment violation — but warned the conclusion could change as coverage grows[19]. The reasoning was that a short retention window across a limited number of cameras did not amount to the exhaustive tracking the Supreme Court worried about in Carpenter v. United States.

Two things follow from that. First, the case is on appeal. Second — and this is why retention matters so much — the ruling rested partly on how long the data is kept. A longer retention period weakens exactly the reasoning that saved Norfolk.

The challenge was brought by the Institute for Justice, a libertarian public interest law firm. The ACLU is fighting the same cameras from the other direction. That is worth sitting with: this is not a left or right issue, and it has not been treated as one in court.

We are careful here. We are not claiming any of this happened in Yucca Valley. We do not know what happened in Yucca Valley, because the search logs have not been made public. That is the point of asking.

But this is the documented record from other places:

• A Joplin, Missouri officer ran one woman's plate through the system nearly 400 times[5].
• A Texas officer ran a nationwide search for a woman suspected of a self-managed abortion[6].
• Denver's data was searched more than 1,400 times in connection with ICE[7]; Evanston found seven searches that violated its state's law[8].
• An LAPD audit found roughly one in three hot-list alerts was false[11] — and a false alert can mean a felony stop on an innocent driver.

This matters because a council's decision is only as good as what it was told.

• Flock told Oshkosh, Wisconsin its system does not build movement heat maps. It does. That council revoked its approval the next day[3].
• It told Loveland, Colorado it had no federal contracts. It held pilot contracts with Customs and Border Protection and Homeland Security that provided direct data access[14].
• It installed cameras on state road infrastructure without permits in several states. South Carolina found more than 200 unpermitted cameras and imposed a moratorium[13].

The practical lesson from Oshkosh is simple and worth copying: ask the vendor narrow factual questions on the record, in a public meeting, then check the answers afterward.

Stated as strongly as we can put it, because you will hear it at the meeting and because some of it is true.

The Yucca Valley station runs a small force over an enormous area. Vehicle theft and burglary of unoccupied cabins and second homes are real and recurring problems here. Plate readers have recovered stolen vehicles and closed cases. For a department stretched this thin, a tool that works while nobody is watching it is genuinely attractive. And most residents will never be searched, never know, and never be harmed.

Our answer:

We accept the need. We dispute that this is the way to meet it. A targeted alert on a specific stolen plate does not require a permanent, searchable record of 22,000 neighbors' movements — and it is the second thing, not the first, that has no limit on it.

Accuracy cuts against the safety argument too. If a third of hot-list alerts are wrong[11], the tool is generating dangerous stops on innocent people at scale.

And the strongest reassurance offered from the dais — "it's deleted in 30 days anyway" — depends on a retention figure nobody here has published yet.

We would rather tell you this than have someone else use it against us at a meeting.

At least 23 localities have voted to cancel, reject, or deactivate these cameras[25]. Flock has thousands of customers. This is a real and accelerating trend — it is not a collapse, and anyone who tells you the company is finished is overselling it.

Some cities that dropped Flock signed with a competitor for the same capability. A cancellation that is not followed by an ordinance tends not to hold — which is exactly what happened in Austin[21].

None of that changes what a town can do about its own contract. It just means doing it properly.