Yucca Valley · Highway 62
A camera on the 62
wrote this about you.
Twenty license plate cameras photograph every vehicle that passes through town. Each one logs the plate, the car, the place, and the time, whether or not anyone suspects you of anything. The Town paid extra to keep that record for a full year, twelve times the vendor's standard.
Volunteer-run · Non-partisan · Every claim on this page is sourced
The reason field is free text and no one verifies it. When Flock began blocking words like "immigration" and "abortion", officers elsewhere typed "investigation" and the search went through.
An illustration built from the fields these systems store. The blacked-out lines are the ones agencies elsewhere have refused to release.
01The contract
What the Town signed
Every figure below is quoted from the agreement and the minutes, filed in the Town's own public meeting portal.
Highway 62 is the one road in and out of the basin: to work, to school, to the VA and back. The Sheriff's installation filing puts the cameras at seven of its crossings, from Kickapoo to Deer[38], with twenty cameras across five intersections in Phase I[36]. Exact positions have not been published. They do not need to be: a handful of cameras on that road covers nearly every resident, nearly every day.
The condition the Council set
The Council did not approve this outright. It attached a requirement:
"Direct staff to develop and return an automated license plate reader policy addressing specific details to protect privacy and civil liberties … for consideration and approval prior to program implementation."— the motion the Council passed, 16 September 2025[32]
The Town Manager said the policy would come back "in the near future." A council member asked when. The cameras went up anyway. We searched all 96 meetings in the Town's portal since that night for a privacy policy, a data management policy, ALPR, or Flock, and found nothing after that one item.[33]
Before any other question, the Council owes residents this one: where is the policy it required?
02The record
What these cameras do
Six findings, each with a source you can check.
- 01
Every car is logged, suspect or not
No warrant, no suspicion: the cameras record each vehicle that passes. Norfolk, Virginia bought 172 of them to build what officials called a "curtain of technology" you could not drive around[1]. Yucca Valley needs far fewer, because the 62 is the only way through.
- 02
It records more than your plate
These systems build a "vehicle fingerprint": make, model, color, roof rack, bumper stickers, the dent in your fender[2]. That identifies your car even when no plate is visible.
- 03
The data leaves town
Agencies can opt in to nationwide lookup sharing. Syracuse found outside agencies had searched its local data 4.4 million times[9]. Denver's logs showed more than 1,400 searches tied to federal immigration enforcement[7]. Neither council knew until a resident requested the records.
- 04
The only safeguard is a text box
An officer types a reason for each search, and nobody checks it. An Austin audit found more than a fifth of searches had no justification recorded at all[10]. When Flock began filtering words like "immigration," officers typed "investigation" and the search went through[4].
- 05
One officer searched one woman 400 times
In Joplin, Missouri, an internal investigation found a police officer had run one woman's plate through the Flock system nearly 400 times[5]. She was not a suspect in any case. He had access to a system that could tell him where her car had been, and a reason field nobody read.
- 06
The town does not control the cameras
Littleton, Massachusetts switched its cameras off. Flock powered them back on remotely without telling the town, which then had to order them taken off the poles[12].
03Retention
A year of your movements
longer than the vendor's own default retention period.
The 365-day figure comes from the order form the Town signed: "Extended data retention (Up to 1 Year)", purchased for all twenty cameras. A year of storage is a year in which any agency on the network can reconstruct where your car has been.
04What to do
Three things, in order of impact
Residents in the towns that removed these cameras did some version of this list. None of it requires expertise.
- Step 12 minutes, from your phone
Send one email to the Council
Councils count messages from residents, and a local address reads differently from a form letter. Ten sincere emails from people in town move a five-member council.
Get the template, or send it in one click → - Step 23 minutes at a microphone
Speak at a council meeting
This carries more weight than anything else on the list. You do not need technical knowledge; you need to live here and say so. There is a script you can read word for word.
Get the script and the meeting date → - Step 3One email, then the agency has 10 days
Request the records
Documents ended these programs elsewhere. Denver's council reversed after a resident obtained the search logs[7]. Austin's flipped after its own audit surfaced[10]. Once the documents exist, the argument stops being an argument.
File a public records request →
The next chance to speak
Tuesday 18 August 2026, 5:00 p.m.
The Yucca Room, Yucca Valley Community Center, 57090 Twentynine Palms Highway
Meetings here get cancelled often; seven of the last ten months had one. Check the agenda portal the day before, or you may drive to a locked room.
What we are asking the Town to do
- Terminate the Flock Safety contract and do not renew it.
- Physically remove the cameras — not just switch them off.
- Delete the stored data and obtain written confirmation that it is deleted.
And a fourth, so it cannot come back quietly: Adopt an ordinance requiring a public hearing and a recorded council vote before the Town acquires any future surveillance technology. Austin cancelled without one and had the technology back, by another route, within eight months[21].
05The full file
Check our work
None of this is required reading before you act. It is here so you can verify us.
What California law already requires
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].
The state enforces both. The 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 administrative, not political: where is our policy, and where is our audit? If the Town and the Sheriff's Department cannot produce them, the Council has a compliance problem to fix regardless of how anyone feels about surveillance.
What the courts have said
In January 2026 a federal judge held that Norfolk's network did not violate the Fourth Amendment, while warning the conclusion could change as coverage grows[19]. The ruling rested on a short retention window across a limited number of cameras: in the court's view, that fell short of the exhaustive tracking the Supreme Court worried about in Carpenter v. United States.
The case is on appeal. And because the reasoning turned on how long the data is kept, a 365-day retention period weakens the argument that saved Norfolk.
The Institute for Justice, a libertarian public interest firm, brought that challenge. The ACLU is fighting the same cameras from the other direction. In court, this has not been a left-right issue.
What has gone wrong elsewhere
None of the incidents below happened in Yucca Valley, as far as anyone knows. Nobody can check, because the local search logs have not been released. This is the documented record from places that did release them:
- 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].
- Outside agencies searched Denver's data 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.
Whether the company has been straight with councils
A council's decision is only as good as what the vendor told it.
- Flock told Oshkosh, Wisconsin its system does not build movement heat maps. It does. The 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].
Oshkosh's method is worth copying: ask the vendor narrow factual questions on the record, in a public meeting, then check the answers.
The case for the cameras
You will hear this at the meeting, and some of it is true. The Yucca Valley station runs a small force over an enormous area. Vehicle theft and burglary of unoccupied cabins are recurring problems here. Plate readers have recovered stolen vehicles and closed cases, and a tool that works while nobody watches it appeals to a department stretched this thin.
Our answer:
We accept the need and dispute the method. A targeted alert on a specific stolen plate does not require a year-long, searchable record of 22,000 neighbors' movements, and the second thing is the one with 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.
And the reassurance most often offered from the dais, "it's deleted in 30 days anyway," is false here: the Town bought 365.
How big this rollback really is
At least 23 localities have voted to cancel, reject, or deactivate these cameras[25]. Flock has thousands of customers. The trend is real and accelerating; the company is not collapsing, and anyone who says otherwise is overselling.
Some cities that dropped Flock signed with a competitor for the same capability, and a cancellation without an ordinance behind it tends not to hold. Austin's did not[21].
A town can still end its own contract. It has to do it properly, which is why we ask for four things rather than one.
06Precedent
Towns that already did this
Councils across the political spectrum have ended these contracts.
07Open questions
What we don't know
4 questions about Yucca Valley we could not answer from a document. If you can answer one with a record, we will publish it and correct this page.
- Unconfirmed
The Council required an ALPR privacy policy to come back for approval before the program was implemented. Where is it?
- Unconfirmed
Has the annual audit of ALPR searches required by Civil Code section 1798.90.51 ever been performed? If so, please produce it.
- Unconfirmed
How many times has Yucca Valley data been searched by agencies outside California, or by federal agencies?
- Unconfirmed
The term began on 'first installation and validation'. On what date was that, and therefore what is the deadline to give notice of non-renewal?
The next council meeting
Tuesday 18 August 2026 · 5:00 p.m.
The Yucca Room, Yucca Valley Community Center, 57090 Twentynine Palms Highway (SR 62), Yucca Valley, CA 92284
The Town Council can end this contract, and any resident may speak for three minutes. You do not need technical knowledge. You need to live here and say so.
Meetings here get cancelled. Check the Town's agenda portal the day before you go.