Berkeley Copwatch has been galvanizing the community to lobby city council members to stop the deployment of FLOCK cameras and to end mass surveillance in Berkeley. Despite multiple assurances from Police Chief Jen Louis to the Berkeley City Council that data collected from FLOCK surveillance cameras would be inaccessible to ICE and CBP, evidence to the contrary has come to light. This deeply troubling development exposes an irony, following the January 2025 rededication of Berkeley as being a “sanctuary city”.
At the meeting of the Police Accountability Board of Nov. 5, 2025, Berkeley Police Department’s (BPD) required internal audit showed that external law enforcement agencies searched Berkeley’s Automatic License Plate Reader (ALPR) data, using terms such as “ICE” and “CBP” in the search engine’s “reason” field.
In a Nov. 4, 2025 letter from the Chair of the Police Accountability Board, Joshua Cayetano explained, “My understanding is that BPD identified the noncompliant use of Flock ALPR data in July 2025, before its presentation to Council, requesting that the City contract with Flock for its external fixed surveillance cameras. In its materials… BPD did not mention that it had identified a potential policy violation of Policy 1305 or Berkeley’s sanctuary city resolution.”…