What’s with Oakland’s Flock contract?

The Oakland Observer goes to council meetings and writes about it so that we don’t have to. We thank him for his service, and extend our condolences for all that time in proximity to Ken Houston. We wanted to ask him some questions about the city’s elusive contract with Flock, so we did. 

ORB: For a while, you’ve been observing that despite a 7-1 council vote last December to “continue using a mass surveillance network of nearly 300 cameras to track vehicles throughout the city under a $2.25 million contract,” we sort of, currently, don’t have an actual contract with Flock. Can you explain that?

Oakland Observer: Thanks for asking that, it’s one of the most important and overlooked issues right now in Oakland. I confirmed with OPD that the Flock contract has still not been executed, something I’ve done regularly starting in March. It’s now almost a year later, without signing a contract, which is pretty weird, and newsworthy. I would speculate that Oakland is likely using Flock through a continuing memorandum of understanding with CHP, which still has a year of contingency left to it and doesn’t expire until next year.

To clarify, when you say “executed,” what do you mean? A year since council approved the terms…but OPD hasn’t followed through? Or the city hasn’t? What exactly hasn’t happened?

Executing a contract, like signing it on the dotted line so that it’s officially enacted. I think that's the legal term. Basically, the way council does things is it authorizes the City Administrator’s Office (CAO), or another city agency in conjunction with the CAO, to sign a contract, but council does not actually sign the contract itself. The CAO/OPD presented their intentions in signing the contract. Sometimes they present very specific terms, sometimes they are more vague. But council gives permission for the CAO to negotiate then sign the contract based on that understanding. That’s why, frequently, things that people assume happened don’t actually happen, if the contract is never executed.

Does it actually matter that the contract wasn’t executed? 

I think so. It’s a big organizing opportunity, for the many who don’t want Flock—and I’d say it’s likely a majority of the city by now—whether because of the lack of real impact on safety, or the intrusiveness of it. Folks could be demanding that council rescind its authorization to sign a contract, since it never happened. Council could direct the city administrator to either find a closed circuit alternative or even move away from Automated License Plate Readers altogether. Since the city currently has no contract with Flock, it could stop using the service tomorrow and tell Flock to take its devices back home.

Then, there are also those people who, for whatever reason, not only wanted Flock, but they wanted the add-ons that OPD was promising to increase public safety. Those haven’t happened, because the contract included those new products and services. For example, OPD wanted to place about forty to fifty pan-tilt-zoom cameras throughout the city on public property, which would be a pretty big move. But it also would have taken on a new Flock platform that would allow residents with residential and business surveillance cameras to plug their cameras into the Flock platform, and apparently that could have turned those cameras into live surveillance tools with a very vague set of policies around doing so. The additions would have been open-ended, initially forty cams, but more potentially over time, adding on Flock drones and whatever else they invent during the contract. 

And none of that can happen without a new signed contract?

Right. It’s very strange, because OPD presented these additions as absolutely necessary to continue reducing crime, and council appeared to agree in their majority vote. But all that could only happen if there was a contract, and since there never was a contract, it never happened. Almost a year later, those Flock fans are only now finding out that these additions never occurred because a contract was never executed and they aren’t happy about it (from what I’ve seen in their online discussions). 

Then there’s a big onus on council too. Like, why didn’t they ever tell the public there wasn’t a contract? Especially the big public safety moguls, Charlene Wang and Ken Houston, the chair and cochair of the public safety committee respectively. They still haven’t agendized anything to talk about the Flock contract, or even mentioned it in public discussion as far as I’ve seen. 

So…why don’t we have a contract? Why haven’t they signed it?

It’s a great question. I don’t know anyone who has an actual working theory about why the contract hasn’t been signed, and the people who track this stuff the closest don’t seem to know either. But one speculation I’ve seen is that pending litigation has the city hedging to see how it fares. There could also be issues with what Flock promised in a public forum to council versus what it’s actually prepared to do. I honestly don’t know. This is speculative, and no one really seems to know. And more importantly, the people we rely on, mainstream reporters with resources and leverage to dig this stuff out, have barely mentioned the reality.

What do we actually know about how OPD is actually, currently, using these cameras?

We do know quite a bit thanks to the city’s surveillance ordinance, which also created the Privacy Advisory Commission (PAC). That law requires every city agency that wants a new technology to get a use policy approved by council, with a PAC recommendation first; then that agency must present a report to the city council, annually, about how they used the tech, outcomes, impacts, etc. 2025 was the first full year of Flock operation for OPD, and the numbers are staggering. The report shows that OPD collected over half a billion license plate captures throughout the city, about 638 million captures of Oakland resident vehicles going about their everyday, which obviously include you, me and every person reading this who has a vehicle with a license plate. They also let dozens of other agencies in California—and out—look at these captures with a simple dynamic online form application. 

If you’re thinking “that’s too many captures, no one can control or oversee this level of data,” you’re right and OPD admits as much in its report. OPD clearly states it turned off its “stolen plate” and “stolen vehicle” alerts, because there’s just too many of them and they don’t have the personnel to sift through them. 

What I’m also thinking is that if that’s too much data for OPD to monitor, how can anyone be watching the watchers? And the watchers watching over OPD’s shoulders?

The auditing system overseeing how Flock’s database of license plate images is being used is a statistical audit, periodically conducted. It doesn’t have a real-time component. That means almost any agency can get away with any weird search pretext to get a look at your movements through a very long period of time before OPD would even notice. Now, some agencies that did that or shared the information with an outside agency have been cut off from OPD’s list of networked agencies. They cut off the Northern California Regional Intelligence Center months before the scandal about that exploded, for example, because it noticed the sharing with the outside fusion center in one of its audits. But that fusion center still got what it was looking for first. There’s no going back from that. Later, several local agencies got caught out in an ongoing relationship with NCRIC and had to cut ties, including the ALCO sheriff and SFPD. That’s all well after the last scandal that came up in 2025 with SFPD and OPD allowing agencies to look at images that they then shared with immigration agencies. 

All of this should tell you that the audit system is inherently flawed, and OPD has basically said it can’t create a better system because it doesn’t have enough personnel. An astute commenter at a council meeting pointed out that any agency can get a yearlong profile of your movements in Oakland before they ever get flagged doing so—and that’s even assuming they do get flagged in the statistical audit, or that their excuse for looking at your data raises a red flag to OPD. For now, OPD has limited its sharing network to police agencies in Northern California—but that happened after the sharing was visibly out of pocket for many months in 2024 and 2025.

What kinds of rationales are needed for an agency to look into that collected data?

Well, it’s interesting, OPD tried to add a significant policy change into its annual report by adding dozens of new rationales that an agency or OPD cop could enter to get a look at the ALPR database. The new list would expand from a handful of about six pretexts, serious crimes, to things like pornography and some really semantically vague pretexts. One entry is for “terroristic threats,” a term no longer used for the criminal act of making a threat of violence to another person in California, but it’s also conflated with a slash for “terrorism.” 

This list is almost certainly a Flock boilerplate, or derived from something used in other jurisdictions—it’s OPD’s use policies bleeding into Flock’s product packaging. It’s a worrisome thing to see, because it makes you wonder who’s in charge here. And I once requested the operational status of a handful of Flock cameras during a defined period in a public records request, and OPD basically told me it has no records for whether those Flock cameras were functional during that period. 

You said they tried to add new pretexts? Did that change pass?

Well, OPD sought to introduce the pretext change in a required approval of its 2025 Flock annual report, and because the surveillance policy allows changes to be introduced in the report, maybe they didn’t think they had to make a note of it in the legislative record. But the city attorney caught what appeared to be them sneaking in a policy change without due notice to the public. OPD pulled it at the last minute, for this reason. But they also promised to have it come back in the new legislative session which begins in September. That herky-jerky process, which makes it seem like even OPD and the city don’t know what’s legal, continues to be a red flag for this company and the tech in general. 

Jaime Omar Yassin is the founder and publisher of the Oakland Observer, a community-supported independent newsletter focused on detailed city hall reporting.