Anti-Flock camera movement taking shape in Mesa County

A national week of action against automatic license plate-reading cameras (ALPRs) will occur this month, from August 16-22. Accordingly, the first meeting of a new group, DeFlock Mesa County, was held Wednesday, August 5 as an in-person meeting at the Mesa County Public Library’s Central branch.  A second meeting, a virtual one, will be held on Saturday, August 8 at 5:30 p.m.  It will be an introductory meeting about the group and how people can get involved. To get the link to attend the virtual meeting online, send a direct message (DM) to @deflockmesacounty on Instagram or email deflockmesacounty@proton.me.

Indivisible Grand Junction announced inaugural meetings of DeFlock Mesa County for Community members concerned about the increasing use of license plate-reading cameras by local governments to carry out mass surveillance. ALPRs take millions of pictures of license plates that law enforcement can then use to follow people around to and from work, their homes, health care appointments, jobs, houses of worship and everywhere in between. Beyond license plate numbers, the cameras also record and catalogue additional distinguishing characteristics about your vehicle, including  its color, make and model, and other distinctive visual characteristics like dents, scratches, bumper stickers, magnets and roof or bike racks. If you drive on public streets in Grand Junction, your movements have been photographed, recorded and fed into a huge database searchable by artificial intelligence.

Abuse of the system

The Flock database is essentially an authoritarian tracking system that Convicted Felon/Adjudicated Sexual Abuser/President Trump’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement has already used to help carry out his Administration’s cruel, abusive and aggressive immigrant removal program. A Texas police officer used the nationwide license plate reading database to search for a woman who reportedly had had a self-administered abortion. Abortion is illegal in Texas. There are 28 cases in which rogue police officers used the Flock database to stalk romantic partners.

In May of this year, Paonia residents confronted the town council after they discovered that  council had purchased two dozen new AI-enabled, facial recognition surveillance cameras at a cost of over $50,000 and had installed them around town, without giving the public any notice or input into the decision. While the system had the capacity for facial recognition,  town board members assured citizens it was not in use. But a Paonia resident and former member of the town’s planning board filed open records requests for the cameras’ audit logs and found the facial recognition function was not only turned on, but it had been accessed by Paonia Police Department personnel about 100 times across 65 days. Town residents got angry about the cameras and attended public meetings to express their angst to Council over it. The Paonia town board subsequently voted to remove the cameras and sell the entire system. 

In July, 2026, the Aspen Police Department scrapped their Flock camera system after members of the community expressed discomfort with the surveillance technology and its ramifications. The Aspen Police Department decided to scrap the system to preserve trust with the town’s residents.

Other towns that have stopped using the cameras include Denver, Fort Collins and Longmont.

If you want to join concerned community members in fighting mass surveillance in Mesa County, you can get more info and the virtual link to their meeting tomorrow by sending a DM (direct message) to @deflockmesacounty on Instagram or email deflockmesacounty@proton.me.