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Amid national backlash against Flock, Chula Vista may seek closer ties with company. Why this matters. Chula Vista police were the first in the U.S. authorized by the Federal Aviation Administration to fly drones beyond the line of visual sight to respond to 911 calls anywhere in the city. The program has been replicated across the nation. Chula Vista Police say switching to the controversial surveillance company Flock Safety to power the city's first-responder drones would save taxpayers an estimated $1.2 million annually. Since 2018, the city has dispatched drones to 911 calls involving crimes in progress, fires, traffic collisions and other emergencies before officers arrive. Officials have defended using them even as opponents have pushed back on the program, touting on the city website that drones have saved lives and de-escalated potentially dangerous situations. From the Documenters. This story came in part from notes taken by Melina Jimenez, a San Diego Documenter, at a Chula Vista Privacy Protection and Technology Advisory Commission meeting last month. The Documenters program trains and pays community members to document what happens at public meetings. Chula Vista's contract for the drones expires at the end of the year, and staff say a new system from Flock would allow the city to deploy a drone within seconds of a 911 call and arrive on scene in under three minutes. The system would provide live aerial information to officers, allow more citywide coverage and support fully autonomous flights without a visual observer. The financial savings would come from the city no longer needing to pay remote pilots who operate the existing drone program, staff said in a report. Spokesperson Caitlin Clark said the proposal to move to Flock's platform known as Aerodome would allow the department to move toward drones that are compliant with federal laws. It also would allow the city to continue using some of its existing drones during the transition rather than requiring an immediate replacement of the fleet, she said. The new system would provide airspace-awareness and automation capabilities under a "drone-in-a-box" model that would reduce the city's reliance on contracted remote pilots and visual observers. But Flock, best known for providing law enforcement agencies with automatic license plate readers, has been broadly criticized for its surveillance system of more than 100,000 cameras nationwide. Residents across the U.S. have increasingly pushed back against local governments' contracts with the company - some cities have even seen the cameras vandalized in recent weeks. Privacy and civil liberties advocates say that widespread use of the cameras has created a national network that allows law enforcement to track people's movements, including people who are not suspected of a crime. Some have also raised questions about how long data is stored, who can access it and how information is shared between law enforcement agencies. As a 2022 inewsource investigation revealed, half of San Diego County's 10 law enforcement agencies had been sharing license plate data with other agencies across the U.S. - despite state law requiring that the information stay in California. Former state Sen. Jerry Hill, a Democrat from San Mateo who sponsored the privacy law, told inewsource it was exactly what lawmakers tried to prevent. Seth Hall, co-founder of the community group San Diego Privacy, said communities "are fundamentally changing the way we are thinking about what police do for the community, and how they do it, with this technology." "Their Drone as a First Responder program is just an extension of all of those problems," he said. "It's taking all of the problems that we have with that company, taking them off mounted poles, and launching them into the air." Help Inewsource keep reporting on Chula Vista's police drone policies. Give $10 Clark said the Flock contract would not change the purpose of the city's drones program or the policies governing how the drones can be used. The Police Department does not use drones for random surveillance or proactive patrols, she said. Drone flights are logged daily and subject to regular supervisory review, while flight information will continue to be publicly available through its transparency tools. Clark also said the city maintains safeguards for the department's use of Flock's automated license plate reader technology, including regular audits for compliance with policy and law. The proposed five-year agreement with Flock would cost the city $400,000 in its first year, which is expected to be fully offset by terminating the contract for remote pilots. After that, the city will pay $700,000 annually. City staff were expected to present the contract to councilmembers this month, but have since postponed. A spokesperson told inewsource on Friday that a new date has not been determined. Flock did not respond to multiple requests for comment. Type of content. News: Based on facts, either observed and verified directly by the reporter, or reported and verified from knowledgeable sources.

This youtuber got kicked out of the Flock convention. So he ran his own surveillance. (opinion). Benn Jordan wants the snoopers to be "a little unsettled." Matthew Petti Mon, August 24, 2026 at 2:08 PM PDT The surveillance contractor Flock Safety argues that police customers don't need a warrant to track drivers with its automated license plate reading cameras because drivers have "no reasonable expectation of privacy" on public roads. So YouTube host Benn Jordan applied the same logic back on Flock. He sat outside Flock's recent police convention in Atlanta with radio equipment and a drone, which he used to unmask attendees and even listen to microphones inside the convention hall. "Flock values their privacy. Oh well," Jordan wrote in the title of his video on the convention. His plans didn't quite start out that way. Jordan, an early and outspoken critic of Flock, wanted to visit the convention to see what the relationship between police and the company was like after a string of cases in Georgia involving police misusing Flock products, he tells Reason. After downloading the conference app, he looked inside the source code and found that it revealed the entire guest list. Jordan alerted Flock to the data breach. Once the company caught wind that Jordan was coming, it canceled his tickets. But the attempts to keep Jordan out went further than that. An employee from Flock called the hotel to cancel Jordan's room reservation, which he had booked himself, according to a video Jordan posted of a call with the hotel. (Flock did not respond to Reason's request for comment.) Jordan even found out that all of the rest of the rooms and even the parking lots surrounding the hotel had been booked. Still, he was able to find a public parking spot within view of the hotel, where he parked a van with dozens of WiFi adapters, a parabolic dish antenna, and a dipole array. This equipment picked up the signal from the convention hall's wireless microphones, allowing Jordan to hear attendees' conversations. "Everything was on public channels," he says. Then he used a drone to photograph attendees walking out and used facial recognition to figure out their identities. Ironically, government regulations helped Jordan with his surveillance, because the Federal Communications Commission limits wireless microphones to broadcast on very specific frequencies. Although it's within a private company's right to choose who can and can't come to its conference - and Jordan acknowledges that keeping outsiders away from the hotel can be a reasonable security measure - many of the attendees were police officials, presumably attending on the taxpayer dime. More fundamentally, it's an issue of different rights for different people. While Flock and its police customers are happy to erode the expectation of privacy in everyday life, they carve out ultra-private spaces for themselves. Indeed, Jordan is careful not to reveal anything he picked up from his radio surveillance, telling Reason that the point was simply to show that it could be done. "Public officials should know that you can't go to a private thing where journalists aren't allowed and not expect anybody to fly a drone from public view. You should be a little unsettled about going to something like that," Jordan adds. He says that he's ultimately happy that his stunt drew attention to the lack of transparency. Although automatic license plate readers have been raising privacy concerns for years, the growth of Flock is particularly alarming because the company plugs police departments around the country into a central database that isn't subject to court orders or the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution. And the lack of oversight isn't just theoretical. Police officers have been caught using Flock data to stalk romantic interests. One woman spent two weeks in jail, and another was detained at gunpoint because of mistaken identifications from Flock cameras. The American public is becoming increasingly hostile to these cameras. At least 56 cities and towns have ended their Flock contracts in 2026 over privacy concerns. Ring, a doorbell camera company owned by Amazon, also canceled its planned partnership with Flock over public backlash. More alarmingly, citizens have started vandalizing the cameras. Jordan, whose YouTube channel covers eclectic science topics from animal hearing to modern train synthesizers, accidentally found himself at the forefront of the movement against Flock. He saw mysterious new cameras in his neighborhood early last year, followed his instincts to reverse engineer everything, and found security vulnerabilities allowing anyone to access Flock footage without a password. In response to Jordan's video, Flock CEO Garrett Langley sent officials around the country a letter in December 2025 claiming that "Flock has never been hacked" and is "under coordinated attack...from the same activist groups who want to defund the police, weaken public safety, and normalize lawlessness." The city of Staunton, Virginia, published the letter in its announcement that it was ending its relationship with Flock. Although he hasn't gotten any response for his surveillance of the Flock conference, Jordan tells Reason that he's had police show up outside his house "and just blast their siren" in the past. He claims he also spotted a private investigator (who is unlicensed and a convicted felon) hanging around his house, but couldn't figure out who hired them. Despite the unwanted attention, Jordan has continued speaking to city councils and police departments around the country. While he says that he would prefer no license plate tracking to begin with, he has been pitching a solution to cities that are going to do it anyway: locally owned cameras feeding into locally owned databases that police need a warrant from a judge to access. "I want there to be an end to this investigation...I generally never make a video about the same thing twice," Jordan tells Reason. "But unfortunately, I have cameras everywhere all around my neighborhood, so I can't not think about it."