Op-ed: We kicked government spy cameras out of Sedona. You can too

Arizonans of all political perspectives are sick of overreaching government surveillance. We are three Sedona area residents — Trump and Harris voters — who helped kick mass surveillance out of Sedona. You can do it, too.

Almost all Phoenix metro area cities, and many other Arizona cities, are using Automatic License Plate Readers (ALPRs) to record vehicle trips. Many of those cameras are made by Flock Safety, which stores the images it captures in a nationwide network. In the Phoenix metro area, there are many hundreds of such cameras recording millions of your vehicle trips, in intimate detail, per month. You are being surveilled when you drive to your child’s school and your church. They capture your movements when you go to your lawyer’s office or an AA meeting. When you go to an anti-abortion rally — or to a pro-choice one — those cameras see it.

ALPRs have been blanketing the U.S. with very little public discussion and in the glaring absence of any regulation. It’s not just a matter of photographing a license plate here and there. It’s a continuous, detailed recording of your life and trips, almost wherever you go.

When it came out that Sedona had entered into a contract with Flock Safety to install 12 photo cameras and snap some 20,000 photos per day to record our every move, people were stunned and angry. Even our city council members were surprised, given that the council had not been briefed about such an important policy issue. The surveillance program had been pushed on the city manager by our former mayor, Scott Jablow, and was embedded in a small budget line approved along with hundreds of other budget lines not subject to full discussion in public hearings.

For sure, ALPRs have law enforcement purposes. It allows local police to create “hot lists” of vehicles they want to track and receive instantaneous alerts for active arrest warrants tied to vehicle owners. But instead of looking for individualized suspicion, ALPRs surveil all of us, plucking out data of possible wrongdoers as the government sees it. Since there are almost no controls on these systems — and no regulation by the State of Arizona — we are left with the “just trust us” line of those who are entrusted to protect us. ALPRs change the nature of policing from one of protection to one of surveillance.

Without effective controls, your car trips could be accessed by police in other states or by federal agencies. Flock Safety boasts of making available to any Flock law enforcement signatories billions of photographs tracing our vehicle movements across the United States, all without a warrant. Whether to limit this data sharing is left up to individual law enforcement agencies. Already, significant problems have arisen.

Recently, a Texas sheriff used ALPR data to track a Texas resident who was driven out of state to have an abortion, now a criminal offense in Texas but not elsewhere. Australia used ALPRs to monitor and track down people who allegedly violated quarantine zones during the COVID-19 pandemic. In one egregious example, a sheriff’s deputy in another state used the local ALPR system to track the movements of his ex-wife more than 100 times.

City contracts with ALPR providers also have wildly varying data retention policies. Some have Flock or other providers store your travel data for 30 days, others for six months and some permanently. That means your past vehicle trips can also be pulled and scrutinized. And there are rarely policies in place to prevent local law enforcement itself from downloading and permanently saving your travel data, independent of Flock or other providers.

When Sedona residents found out about our town’s Flock cameras, we educated our neighbors and organized. We submitted hundreds of postcards and emails and directly lobbied our city council. It worked — the Sedona City Council was the first council in Arizona to cancel its contract with Flock. Within two weeks, Flagstaff followed its lead. Both councils made the right decision.

Mass public surveillance goes against the fundamental Arizona values of privacy and freedom from unwarranted government surveillance and intrusion. Arizona’s legislature should protect our freedoms and ban ALPRs. If they fail to act, Arizona city councils or local citizens’ initiatives should move to ban them.

Mikkel Jordahl, Sandy Boyce and Laura Masters are Sedona-area residents.