Take action 💪
More Dane County Surveillance BS 📣
When: 7:00 pm Thursday June 4
Where: City-County Building, downtown on MLK [second floor, front of building]
What: Dane County Board Meeting [agenda]
Register in opposition for item M5: 2026 RES-027: Giving Dane County Sheriff's Office their Flock $80k back to do more cameras and surveillance
You can contact your Supervisor about this by finding them here. We especially need people to contact supervisors who are new or might be on the fence, because this is a 2/3rds vote. ⚖️
If you want to give testimony in person, you can just roll up and sign up
before the meeting starts.
If you want to sign up ahead of time or attend online, fill out the "attend a meeting" page using the details below!
Details 🫠
Register in opposition for item M5: 2026 RES-027: Giving Dane County Sheriff's Office $80k to do more surveillance
Even More Things 🥰
There are some actually good resolutions on this Thursday's agenda you may want to register in support of:
-
item K23. 2026 RES-026: Calling on UW-Health to resume providing gender-affirming health care to transgender youth
-
item K25. 2026 RES-038: Jail communications RFP with focus on privacy, affordability, and transparency
-
item K26. 2026 RES-039: Data center moratorium
Talking points about $80k for cameras 🤨
- When we came out to say FLOCK NO, we all managed to agree that Flock Safety is a terrible company, but we need to be clear: people who live in Dane County simply do not want unchecked surveillance in our community. 🏘️
- Good things about this resolution 👍
- Requiring public input on a draft of the RFP: VERY GOOD!
- Requiring exclusive ownership to the collected data: OKAY!, if we have to collect data 🙄
- Bad things about this resolution 👎
- It's more cameras.
- Cameras don't stop crimes from happening.
- Cameras get abused, and even good usage auditing [which this proposal does not require, see below] doesn't stop that until after it happens.
- We have to start investing in fixing the inequality that underlies most harm, not continuing to buy into the failed methods of fear and punishment.
- We need to stop giving our over-funded systems of punishment money to buy techno-toys, maybe until they manage to reduce the nearly-worst-in-the-nation racial bias in arrests. [Which is... apparently never going to happen. Reports about it every 10 years, no actual change.]
- Auditing 📋
- This resolution fails to require public, civilian audits of the usage of the surveillance system.
- We should not trust the watchers to audit themselves. Blindly trusting people with the monopoly on violence is how you fertilize the ground for abuses.
- Although the board was proud of no known issues happening with Dane County's Flock cameras, that's only because the audit protocol was extremely weak. (The sheriff had the option to bring the ALPR administrator to discuss auditing with the public at PP&J meetings previously.)
- The ACLU of Wisconsin has repeatedly said: if we can't stop them from shoving cameras everywhere, we need civilian control over police surveillance.
- Though this resolution agrees that automated license plate reader cameras "[raise] important concerns regarding privacy, data retention, public accountability, and potential misuse of information", it completely fails to require civilian auditing of the system's actual use.
- Though it requires "independent, third-party auditing of the system’s privacy and security protections" and "comprehensive audit logging" (emphasis ours), it fails to require those audit logs be checked in any way by civilians, not corporate lackeys. And again, hammer the point: it entirely leaves out the most important audit we must have if we allow cameras to pervade our spaces: fully transparent usage auditing, visible to community.
- The resolution also requires "public transparency measures" and an annual report, but none of those measures are written in a way that requires the civilian usage auditing we demand.
- Federal hell 🔥
- If we create surveillance and data, what stops the feds from compelling us to hand it over in service of whatever fucked oppression they pull next?
- Remember, DHS is constantly doing creepy surveillance shit like tracking protestors and doing creepy ad-tech purchases.
- I don't know if everyone has noticed, but the federal government is kind of at war with its citizens these days.
- Maybe don't create the systems that will help them do the white nationalist reich they're trying to pull?
.
.
.
It's all... kind of a lot. 🙃
Evergreen actions 🌲
Even more ideas 💡
- Contact your local police force that's using Flock cameras and ask them
what their policy will be when those cameras are inevitably used by ICE to
terrorize our community - and then research what happened in the Twin Cities
when people in power had made promises and ICE came in force. [Spoiler alert: promises always get broken in
favor of capital and white supremacy. Wonder why that is?]
- More importantly, contact the people who hold the purse strings for that force, and convince
them to cancel the Flock contracts, as Verona and the Dane County Board have
- Support local Civilian Control Over Police Surveillance (CCOPS) ordinances and laws
- Support the state constitutional amendment protecting right to privacy
- Support the national ICE Out of Our Faces Act