The Enumclaw City Council is considering a subscription with the Flock Safety company to install their surveillance cameras within city limits.
I oppose installing these cameras in Enumclaw. The regulations and practices have not caught up with the relatively new business model, and are currently too weak to adequately protect individual freedom.
Public safety interventions must be narrowly focused on those breaking the law, while remaining unobtrusive to law-abiding citizens. As of now there is no requirement to secure a warrant to initiate any search in the database, data is stored for an exceptionally long time, and data sharing parameters with other agencies dilute the responsibility for effective oversight.
The Flock Safety cameras take images of every car that drives down the road – the vast majority of which are not associated with any crime – and send those images to a cloud hosted by Flock Safety to be stored for thirty days. A police officer can then search the location of any car over the previous thirty days, utilizing the data from any entity that has agreed to share with us.
I do not dispute that there is no presumption of privacy regarding pictures taken of your car or license plate. However, your movements over time are private and should not be accessed without meeting a reasonably high legal standard.
A federal lawsuit filed against the city of Norfolk, Virginia asserts this premise and has been allowed to proceed.1 Flock Safety does have an algorithm that blurs faces and certain other characteristics, but this feature alone does not offer sufficient protection from intrusive surveillance.
I have experience surveilling members of the Taliban in Afghanistan; we were able to subtly but effectively track people by identifying their daily routines. The Flock Safety network is certainly capable of tracking specific people using similar techniques to the ones I employed overseas, and that is extremely concerning to me. A telling example involved Officer Victor Heiar. On October 23, 2022, he logged on to his police department’s Flock Safety database to stalk his estranged wife and track her movements retroactive to September 23rd, and sent her harassing text messages regarding her location.2 This case demonstrates the invasive capabilities of the system and the requirement for stronger civil protections.
Additionally, the general oversight of the system is fractured and weak. Trust and accountability of the police are achieved through effective oversight by elected officials.
There are two major problems with the oversight of the Flock Safety program. One is that each city or entity provides oversight of the system only for its own officers, yet shares data broadly with other agencies. In short, another agency may be using the data we share from Enumclaw inappropriately, but we have no ability to audit.
The second issue is the lack of operational oversight of the company itself. For example, many of the privacy mechanisms rely on algorithms that blur faces or other features. We do not have the access required to ensure those features are being applied correctly, or to determine what failure rate may be occurring regarding the algorithm.
Also, there is no way to guarantee that backdoor access is denied to higher-level government agencies. You may remember that the National Security Agency illegally obtained bulk phone records to spy on American citizens, and the program was in place for years before it was publicly identified and shut down.3
Precisely because national surveillance programs are so effective at catching criminals, they are subject to overreach and abuse of individual privacy rights. Flock Safety’s program has grown very quickly, and lacks the mature regulatory system required to address serious privacy concerns.
New Hampshire presents a notable exception: it has implemented a statewide regulatory framework for this type of technology; one requirement is for Flock Safety data to be deleted within three minutes if not associated with an active search. A law like this in Washington would go a long way toward addressing my primary concerns.
I understand that this system will help catch criminals. However, the “future of policing” does not inevitably require relying on invasive technology.
Enumclaw is already one of the safest cities in the state because of our smart investments in public safety. I have strongly supported council decisions to retain our local dispatch center and jail and to resist cuts to police staffing. We all know that the crime problems in Washington are not due to a lack of cameras – true change will only come when our courts do a better job of holding criminals accountable. The Flock Safety cameras would be a band-aid helping to cover some of the symptoms, but would not address the root cause.
In the end, this issue comes down to balance. Are the privacy protections in place adequate relative to the benefit gained?
We do not have to rely on the limits of a legal standard; we can make our own decision as to whether this technology makes sense in our community.
The potential negatives are often difficult to envision, but are very real. There is a thought exercise I believe is useful to clarify the issue: when the Governor declared unprecedented emergency powers and ordered lockdowns in 2020, would you have wanted these cameras in Enumclaw?
1 Katherine Revello, “Flock camera lawsuit can move forward,” Inside Investigator, February 11, 2025, https://insideinvestigator.org/flock-camera-lawsuit-can-move-forward/
2 Michael Stavola, “‘You were spotted’: KS officer who used police cameras to stalk estranged wife sentenced,” The Wichita Eagle, April 5, 2023, https://www.kansas.com/news/local/crime/article274003460.html
3 Ariane de Vogue, “Court rules NSA program illegal,” CNN, May 12, 2025, https://www.cnn.com/2015/05/07/politics/nsa-telephone-metadata-illegal-court/index.html
Chris Gruner is a member of the Enumclaw City Council. The views expressed in this article are his personal views, and do not necessarily reflect those of the full council.
The Courier-Herald reached out to Enumclaw Police Chief Tim Floyd for an opposing opinion, but he declined the invitation.
