Casa Grande residents petition for oversight of city's Flock surveillance cameras

Deflockcg.com hosts the petition for Deflock Casa Grande, a nonpartisan civic campaign pushing back against the Arizona city’s rollout of Flock Safety surveillance cameras. Casa Grande has installed roughly 140 of a planned 200 cameras, split evenly between automated license plate readers and pan-tilt-zoom units. The petition, which has drawn close to 900 signatures, lets residents pick from a menu of demands ranging from tighter limits on third-party access to camera data and real penalties for misuse, up to removing Flock from the city entirely.

The campaign’s argument leans heavily on Flock’s own technology and contract language. It points to a Flock patent describing a system that analyzes video, identifies objects including people, assigns attributes, and converts all of it into searchable records. Organizers raise pointed concerns about Flock employees accessing live feeds, the contract’s loose definition of ‘authorized users,’ and the prospect of AI building persistent profiles of residents, including children’s routines and social ties, that could outlive the images they were derived from.

The effort sits inside a broader national fight over ALPR surveillance. It borrows the name of DeFlock, the open-source camera-mapping project built by Will Freeman and backed by the EFF, which has cataloged over 100,000 readers nationwide and drawn a cease-and-desist from Flock. Casa Grande has become a notable flashpoint, drawing coverage after a local resident proposed turning the same surveillance tools back on government officials to make the privacy stakes concrete.