Boulder needs a strong surveillance policy

I am not comfortable with Boulder’s current use of Flock as of February 2026.

First, the good: Our staff have been doing a lot of work to increase safeguards through our agreement with Flock. As a result, Flock is required to not retain Boulder data for more than 30 days, not share or sell Boulder’s data, and have controls on who has access to Boulder’s data and why.

It’s clear this technology can make good policing more efficient and effective.

And cameras can help Boulder residents for a lot of reasons—including by making streets safer through automated traffic enforcement, as well as for getting a bird’s eye view for firefighting and responding to other threats.

But with Flock there are still too many vulnerabilities, some outside the control of our city, some inherent to the service they are providing.

And there is a national pattern of too many people being hurt by it—for example, tracking of women seeking abortions in Texas, illegally sharing data for immigration enforcement in Illinois, and an accusation of a woman for theft who was exonerated in Denver.

Therefore, I support the team looking at other options. And I understand that is what they have been doing.

And the issue goes beyond Flock. For one, there are other service providers ready to take Flock’s place. Axon, Motorola, Genetec, snd SoundThinking are a few.

Also, the technology is evolving and we can expect to see a lot of innovation with service offerings, especially using AI. That means the choices in front of us are changing.

So we need to develop a policy to guide us—a policy to establish a vision and principles for how, why, and under what conditions we’re going to use surveillance tools like flock in the public sphere going forward.

There are two things we need to contemplate especially:

One, we need to be deliberate about the scale of using surveillance in the public sphere and providing the public what it needs to trust it. 

Two, we need governance for how we use surveillance technologies—to strike a balance between two things:

(1) Leaning in on the use of technology to make good policing and other emergency management efficient and effective 

and

(2) Creating safeguards to avoid misuse and unintended harms of powerful surveillance technologies that could work against public safety and health — with a particular eye to vulnerabilities outside of our city staff’s control.

As discussed at the council retreat in January, the city manager is in the process of assembling a community task force to help sort through the issues and I’m very glad for that effort.

On February 17, Boulder’s human relations commission unanimously asked council and the city manager to take aggressive action, and they offer a good starting point. 

There is also legislation being considered at the capitol led by Senator Judy Amabile--and the city is involved in the discussions. I’m hopeful it will create an opportunity to improve standards and protections for this industry that will lead to greater trust with using these powerful technologies.

We have some work ahead and a lot is coming at us quickly. I believe in our team’s ability to get this right and I am optimistic about what’s ahead.

Note: I shared these comments with James Burky for his story about Boulder’s contract with Flock in the Daily Camera published on March 8. I also spoke to these points at the dais after open comment on March 5.