De-Flock Mesa County will hold a public protest on Sunday, September 27 at 10:30 a.m. at Spring Valley Park to protest mass surveillance cameras currently being used by the City of Grand Junction and Mesa County. The cameras have been sold to communities as a way to increase public safety and reduce crime, but they have become much more than that.
ALPR cameras quietly track, log and share information about the appearance and movements of thousands of vehicles belonging to law-abiding area residents, without law enforcement agencies first having to obtain a warrant. They also play a big part in efforts by private security technology companies to build a nationwide mass surveillance system and massive database of the movements of ordinary citizens.
The Institute for Justice tracks incidents of misuse of the cameras and has identified about 200 incidents of abuse of the databases the cameras generate, mostly by law enforcement employees. In one incident, a Texas deputy accessed a system of about 83,000 mass surveillance cameras to track a woman whose partner alleged she had performed a self-administered abortion. Other incidents show law enforcement officers using the system to stalk and track romantic partners.
The Grand Junction Police Department operates around 30 Automatic License Plate Reading (ALPR) cameras, nine of which are manufactured by Flock. As of July 2025 the Mesa County Sheriff’s Department (MCSO) was using 11 Flock cameras, plus another 15 ALPR cameras manufactured by Motorola and more cameras that the MCSO operates in partnerships with private businesses. Beyond just reading license plates, these cameras use computer vision and artificial intelligence (AI) to catalogue vehicles’ make, model, color, bumper stickers and other unique identifying characteristics like dents, roof racks or missing hubcaps. Newer cameras can even zoom in on and track human figures.
Civil liberties groups like the American Civil Liberties Union and the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) say these are not normal traffic cameras. They are far more invasive, and the databases they generate amount to illegal searches. They are urging communities to reject these creepy cameras.
I would imagine that the cameras are already capable of and being used for facial recognition and what that could entail. The abuse by police officers does bothers me, but not as much as ICE, NSA, DOJ and other agencies using the cameras to track and round up those not bowing down to das Fuhrer.