How did the movement prevail over Flock?
What happens next?
In the lead article in this series, “A Victory—if You Can Keep It,” Berkeley Speaks describes the biggest strength of the Stop Flock campaign: the combined force of the privacy, anti-surveillance movement with the Sanctuary movement in solidarity with immigrant rights.
This Lessons Learned article explains the breadth and power of the campaign, and the lesson that it leaves for the community as it faces the next, critical round of the struggle over mass surveillance.
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May 7 was a temporary win. Technically, all the city council did was kick the can down the road. Five council members agreed that the City should hold a competitive bidding “RFP” process for mass surveillance, instead of an improper sole-source contract for Flock.
And yet, it remains a victory for the Privacy and Sanctuary movements. Here’s why.
Back in the fall of 2025, proponents of mass surveillance held the upper hand. On the council, only Cecilia Lunaparra expressed opposition to the expansion of the City’s engagement with the tainted Flock Group. But the proponents made several key mistakes:
- They overreached by asking for every hardware and software system that Flock offers, including drones and Flock Nova, which supplements ALPR data with sources from other companies and across the internet.
- They failed to take into account how committed Berkeley’s people are to the principle of Sanctuary.
- They did not anticipate the breadth and tenacity of their opposition.
The last failure may be the most important. By May 7, opponents on the council grew from Lunaparra’s lone voice to four of the nine members. Several of them, notably Bartlett and Tregub, credited the overwhelming opposition among their district constituents.
This means that the residents of Berkeley gave moral leadership to the elected leaders.
Hundreds of people demanded the council not just talk tough about Trump, but refuse to collaborate even indirectly with his deportation campaign.
The campaign was notable not just for the raw numbers of Flock opponents, but also the range they represented: organizations like the League of Women Voters, Indivisible Berkeley, East Bay Sanctuary Covenant, and Berkeley Copwatch, along with many teachers and students. People with immigrant neighbors who live in fear every day. Activists concerned that they will be targeted by the Justice Department.
Wilhelmenia (Mina) Wilson is the respected Executive Director of Healthy Black Families, located in South Berkeley. Ms. Wilson wrote to Berkeley Speaks about the impact of mass surveillance on the Black community. She explained that for Berkeley, “the concerns that surveillance technologies raise about civil liberties, racial equity, and community trust are not abstract. They are grounded in recent history, [referring in part to] racist and anti-homeless text messages exchanged among BPD officers….Many in the community experienced the investigation as incomplete, with lingering questions about accountability, transparency, and systemic reform.”
Ms. Wilson went on to state, “Surveillance technologies do not operate in a vacuum. They are layered onto systems already shaped by racial inequity and over-policing. Expanding these tools risks reinforcing patterns of disproportionate impact on Black communities and other marginalized residents—particularly in a city actively working to repair harms rooted in redlining, displacement, and systemic injustice.”
What’s next?
As we explained in our lead article, Flock is not ruled out from applying through the RFP process, and BPD leaders have already stated that Flock is their preferred provider. So while the decision to go to competitive bidding is a good practice, it appears likely that the end result will bring Berkeley back to the same dilemma it faced at the May 7 meeting.