An open letter to Mayor Victor M. Gordo and the Pasadena City Council, ahead of the Flock Safety contract discussion at the Tuesday, November 17, 2026 council meeting.
Dear Mayor Gordo and Members of the City Council:
I am writing about the Flock Safety license plate reader contract, which Vice Mayor Rivas has placed before the full Council for November 17. My request is simple: end it. Do not exercise the next option year, do not replace Flock with another plate-reader vendor, and take the cameras down.
Start with what this system actually is. Pasadena’s 61 Flock cameras logged roughly 1,018,754 vehicle detections in a single recent 30-day period — a million records a month on the movements of people who are suspected of nothing. Every trip to school, to church, to a doctor, to a protest is captured and stored. That is not a crime-fighting tool aimed at suspects; it is a surveillance net thrown over every resident of this city, every day. We would never accept officers following every driver in Pasadena and writing down where they go. We should not accept a private company doing it for us with cameras.
The safeguards we were promised have already failed once. In June, the Police Department cut off the NCRIC fusion center’s access to Pasadena’s Flock data after it came out that outside agencies — including federal immigration enforcement — had reached our residents’ data. The July audit that followed found the department compliant with its own policy, and I do not doubt our officers acted in good faith. But that is exactly the point: the leak did not happen because Pasadena broke its rules. It happened because a database of everyone’s movements exists, and once it exists, it will be reached — by fusion centers, by federal agencies, and, as cases in Missouri and Texas this year showed, by individual officers misusing it to stalk people. The only way to guarantee Pasadena data is never used against Pasadena residents is to stop collecting it.
Then there is the money. This Council is weighing a fire parcel tax that is falling a few hundred votes short, pleading budget challenges on transit, and asking residents to accept less across the board — while continuing to write checks to a surveillance company for a system that reads a million plates a month in a city of 140,000 people. Every option year renews that spending. South Pasadena has taken its cameras down. Los Angeles let its Flock contract lapse. Cities across the country — more than ten since this summer alone — have ended theirs. Pasadena should join them, and the savings should go to services residents actually asked for.
I want to thank Vice Mayor Rivas for forcing this discussion into the open, and Councilmember Hampton for asking in August that the cameras be suspended pending exactly this debate. The Public Safety Committee split on this; now the full Council owns the decision, in public, on the record. AltaPasa’s earlier coverage is here: Flock Cameras in Pasadena and Altadena: Where Things Stand as the Backlash Grows.
On November 17, I ask you to:
- Direct staff to terminate the Flock Safety contract and decline the remaining option year.
- Commit, on the record, not to replace Flock with another automated license plate reader vendor.
- Set a date certain for the 61 cameras to be removed, and for Pasadena’s stored plate data to be deleted.
- Redirect the contract savings to public safety services that do not depend on surveilling the entire city.
Pasadena residents are not suspects. Stop wasting money spying on them.
Respectfully,
Victor Caballero
Pasadena, California
