The National Week of Action against ALPRs — in Washington and across the country

“As business leaders and major event operators call for more surveillance cameras following the Bite of Seattle shooting, grassroots groups will be holding rallies against mass surveillance.

On Monday, seven members of the Community not Cameras coalition will tour Seattle’s Real-Time Crime Center and hold a press conference with Seattle Indivisible to share their experience of the Seattle Police Department’s surveillance network….

Also happening on Monday, a rally against automated license plate readers (ALPRs) will be held at Renton City Hall to coincide with “National Week of Action Against ALPRs.”

— Nia Bliss, Rallies against mass surveillance kick off in King County on Monday, KIRO-7

The map on the National Week of Action site shows over 400 events around the country, also including Olympia, Everett, Kennewick, and Stanwood here in Washington state.  There’s a huge wave of resistance everywhere to AI-enabled mass surveillance systems, especially ALPRs like Flock and Axon, fueled by constant reporting of the abuses: by ICE and CBP to target immigrants, by law enforcement and DHS to surveil protesters and activists, by law enforcement personnel to stalk their exes (or their partner’s exes)…

Here are the Washington-specific and national events I know about — if people have other public links, please leave them in the comments.

• Communities not Cameras / Seattle Indivisible press conference: Monday (8/17), 12:30 pm, Seattle City Hall.
• Deflock Renton Rally: Monday (8/17), 5:00 pm rally, 7:00 Renton City Hall
• Shelton Flock Sees You Rally: Tuesday (8/18), 5:00 protest, 6:00 City Council hearing, Shelton Civic Center
• DeFlock Further 2026 livestream : Tuesday (8/18), 3:00 – 7:00 Pacific time, link coming soon
• Red Wine and Blue’s Flock Cameras 101: The Threat to Privacy and How to Fight Back: Tuesday (8/18), 5:00 – 6:00 Pacific time

Just as with the fight against data centers, the energy is really coming from the grassroots, and in many places it cuts across party lines; as a Republican commissioner of Macon County, North Carolina, said “We had work boots and Subarus in our parking lot and they were united in their position against the Flock cameras.” The surveillance-industrial complex is clearly threatened. Just this last week, Flock has kicked off a major PR offensive, combining some meaningless new “safeguards”  with a meaningless “apology” for getting things wrong and false claims about how valuable the cameras supposedly are.  Meanwhile,  government fusion centers are surveilling anti-Flock activists and issuing alerts.

Especially in that context, the Week of Action is a great opportunity for a show of strength. It’s also a chance to raise awareness and deepen connections both locally and between organizers in different cities and states, and to expand the focus from Flock in two important ways:

• to other ALPRs including Axon (if you’re on Instagram, check out eyesonaxon), Genetec AutoVu, Verkada SoundThinking PlateRanger and Motorola Vigilant Systems. Some cities are just switching from Flock to Axon, which also sells mobile ALPRs, drones, tasers, and the Fusus Real-time Crime Center (RTCC) that Communities not Cameras is touring. Switching vendors doesn’t solve anything; most of the problems are inherent to ALPRs in general. And while while Flock is certainly a bad actor, they’re far from the only bad actor. Axon is the company that announced plans for drones with tasers in schools (see the Statement of Resigning Axon AI Ethics Board Members for more).  SoundThinking has a long history of selling the racist and ineffective ShotSpotter.
• to the broader surveillance-industrial complex including drones, facial recognition, audio surveillance like Flock’s AudioDetection and Shotspotter, predictive policing systems like Peregrine Technologies, and hubs like RTCCs, fusion centers and Palantir.

And in places like Seattle (where surveillance cameras are an issue in a potential Mayoral recall) and Renton (where the city council recently voted to cover the paused Flock cameras with bags but is still debating whether to cancel the contract and what to do about their Axon ALPRs), grassroots organizers are also leveraging the week of action both to increase awareness of their specific campaign and to tie the local to the national.

So whether you’re in Washington or anywhere else, please get involved!  How?

• check the map on noalprs.com to see if it lists an organization in your area.  If not, look around for local DeFlocks, or check with local anti-surveillance, Indivisible and DSA groups
• sign up on NoALPRs.com for updates, because this movement isn’t going away, and there will be a lot more happening after the Week of Action
• on social networks, the hashtags are #NoALPRs, #BanALPRs, and #EndALPRs.
• in the ATmosphere (Blacksky, Latinsky, Northsky, Euroky, Bluesky, etc), check out the Say no to Flock, Axon, and other ALPRs list and Flock/ALPRs (curated) custom feeds (or Flock and other ALPRs if you want to see all the discussion)