photo #9373268

An Oregon activist named Jose Rodriguez has won over $300,000 in public records settlements from 15 local governments in Washington state after they failed to produce images captured by their Flock Safety automated license plate reader (ALPR) cameras. Between 2024 and 2025, Rodriguez filed 53 narrowly tailored records requests asking for 30 minutes of footage from specific cameras, intending to post the images on social media to raise awareness about the extent of local surveillance. However, many cities failed to retrieve the requested files before they were permanently erased by Flock's automatic 30-day rolling deletion cycle.A judge subsequently ruled that the camera images constituted public records under state law, making the cities legally liable for destroying the data, even if the agencies had not yet downloaded the files from Flock's cloud servers. Facing massive financial penalties, 15 jurisdictions agreed to out-of-court settlements ranging from $5,000 to $40,000 each, while two cities are still fighting the claims in court. The costly legal oversight has prompted at least 13 Washington jurisdictions to cancel or deactivate their Flock camera contracts.#flocksafety #alpr #publicrecords #surveillance #washingtonnews