Fair questions

Because the question assumes someone has already decided you are worth checking. A warrant works the other way around: police show a judge a reason first, then they get to look.

These cameras reverse that. They record everyone, all the time, and sort out the reason later — in a text box that nobody verifies.

You already accept this logic in other places. You lock your front door without having anything to hide.

No. Nothing on this site asks for fewer deputies, less funding, or slower response times. The Yucca Valley station runs a small force over a large area, and that is a real problem.

The objection is to a private company holding a permanent record of local drivers, on a network the town does not control, that outside agencies can search without telling anyone here.

Several departments have reached the same conclusion on their own. The Los Angeles Police Department dropped Flock. So did Oxnard PD and San Francisco PD. Those are not activist groups.

Sometimes, and that should be said plainly. Departments have recovered stolen vehicles and closed cases with plate reader hits.

Two things complicate it. First, accuracy: an LAPD audit found a large share of its hot-list alerts were wrong, and a wrong alert can put an innocent driver through a felony stop at gunpoint. Second, the tool that finds a stolen truck is the same tool that logs every trip you take, and it is the second use that has no limit on it.

You can keep a targeted tool — an alert on a specific stolen plate — without keeping a permanent movement log on 22,000 neighbors.

A doorbell camera sees your porch. A store camera sees the store. Neither one follows you.

A plate reader network is different in kind, not degree. It is searchable, it is centralized, it is shared between agencies, and it reconstructs where you were on a given day months after the fact. No shop camera does that.

And there is a geography problem specific to here. Highway 62 is the only real way in or out of the basin. A handful of cameras on that corridor captures nearly every resident, nearly every day.

It hasn't been one. The lawsuit challenging these cameras on Fourth Amendment grounds was brought by the Institute for Justice, a libertarian public interest firm. The ACLU is fighting the same cameras from the other direction.

The people who cancelled contracts include Republican-majority councils and small-town boards in red states. The common thread is not party. It is that a council found out what its own data was being used for and did not like the answer.

The default retention is short. That is not the same as the data being gone.

Anything an outside agency pulls during that window leaves the system and lives under that agency's rules, not ours. Once a record crosses a state line, California's privacy law no longer protects it. The 30-day window limits the archive; it does not limit the copies.

Three things, in this order. Asking for only the first one has failed elsewhere.

1. Terminate the contract.
2. Physically remove the hardware. Littleton, Massachusetts switched its cameras off — and the company powered them back on remotely without telling the town.
3. Delete the stored data, and get written confirmation of the deletion.

Then a fourth, to keep it from coming back quietly: an ordinance requiring a public hearing and a council vote before any future surveillance system is bought. Austin cancelled its contract without one, and the technology was back within eight months by another route.

Send one email to the council, in your own words, saying you live here and you want the contract cancelled. Councils count messages from residents. Ten sincere emails from real addresses in town move a small council more than a thousand signatures from elsewhere.

If you have thirty minutes instead, speak for three minutes at a council meeting. In-person comment is weighted far more heavily than anything else on this list.

Please do not put yourself at risk. Public comment is public, and it is recorded.

You can act without appearing: send a written comment, ask a citizen neighbor to read a statement for you, or support someone else who is speaking. This campaign is partly about the risk you are weighing right now. Nobody involved wants you to absorb more of it to prove the point.

No, and technical detail is usually the weakest kind of comment. Councils respond to residents describing their own lives.

Say who you are, how long you have lived here, what road you drive every day, and what you want the council to do. Three sentences is enough. The evidence on this site is there to back you up, not to be recited.

Residents of the Morongo Basin. It is not affiliated with the Town of Yucca Valley, the Sheriff's Department, any party, or any campaign, and it takes no money.

Check it. Every factual claim carries a numbered link to its source, and the sources are mostly primary documents — court filings, council minutes, agency audits, and attorney general filings.

We also publish what we could not confirm, on the same page, marked as unverified. If something here is wrong, tell us and we will correct it in public rather than quietly.