Public calls for changes after EPD cancels Flock contract

Speaker Public comments express thanks—and anger—after Eugene Police announced they will be canceling their contract with Flock Safety. Dec. 8, Councilor Lyndsie Leech:

Councilor Lyndsie Leech I want to thank our City Manager (Sarah) Medary and our Police Chief (Chris) Skinner for ending the contract with Flock last week for ALPR (automated license plate reader) cameras in Eugene.

I appreciate the ability and the courage that it took to change course, when it became clear to you that it was not in the best interest of our community. I know that decision will be a comfort to many of our community members, especially as we see and feel the impact of the actions being taken by the federal government to target, detain, and at times abduct our legal residents and our community members and our neighbors without due process.

There have been other cities around our state that have declared and adopted resolutions of emergency in response to these federal actions, and it’s my intent to start that process here for the city of Eugene.

Speaker Geoffrey Gordon:

Geoffrey Gordon I’d like to thank Councilors (Lyndsie) Leech and (Jennifer) Yeh for laying the groundwork for a declaration of emergency. And I’m grateful to all of you for your vote on Councilor Leech’s motion today.

I’m grateful to the Council for pushing forward with applications for the replacement for CAHOOTS or the process involved in that. And I’m further grateful to my councilor, Lyndsie Leech, for her hard work looking into the Amazon warehouse project and her actions contributing to the cancellation of the Flock contract.

A lot of the important conversations and research happens away from our eyes. So I know there is more hard work I have not recognized, and I respect that our city manager had the courage to correct her mistake.

I don’t think Chief Skinner deserves any credit, however. We’ve gone to so many City Council and (Police) Commission meetings, wrote so many letters, did so much research in public records requests. Yet Chief Skinner declared repeatedly, after months of being forcefully educated, that he did not understand the privacy concerns of our community. He admitted no wrongdoing. Instead, he dug in right until Friday, when we all saw the surprise Facebook post from the EPD announcing they discovered undisclosed vulnerabilities and abruptly canceled the contract along with Springfield.

What did they discover? Did ICE access our community’s data? On behalf of the citizens of Eugene, I demand a thorough explanation of what they found. And I demand a city ALPR policy that restricts any functional data storage and access to in-county storage.

A final takeaway from this Flock debacle and the ethical investment policy debacle is that too much authority regarding city policy and expenditures is placed in the hands of the unelected city manager position. Decision-making authority in Eugene should evolve such that the current authority of the city manager should be transferred and distributed to city councilors, or else make the manager position an elected position.

Our city staff would remain the glue holding together city operations in any eventuality.

Stan Taylor Hello. My name is Stan Taylor. I’m from Ward 1 and I am the leader of Indivisible Eugene Springfield and one of the co-founders of the Activist Coalition of Eugene Springfield.

First I want to say thank you for the work that you did on Flock and helping to move that out of our city. And thank you for the beginnings of the emergency declaration. Those are both courageous things to do.

Scott Lambert My name is Scott Lambert. I’m a grad student at UO and a member of GTFF Local 3544.

So thank you for getting rid of Flock. I didn’t want them, and I’m glad they’re gone. But I also don’t want Axon or Motorola or any other ALPR cameras. Even if we could explicitly guarantee that the data was controlled by our municipality, which we could not do with Flock, I would still be uncomfortable with the collection of this data at this time, because the city government has demonstrated its inability to keep my data safe solely through its month-long collaboration with Flock.

In addition, we should also remember the damage is done. In the time that Flock was with us, hundreds of hundreds of thousands of dollars were at least allocated to be spent, dozens of people were abducted, and data was collected on every resident who drove past a camera that I expect is basically out of our hands now and in Flock’s, although I am glad that the provision to end our contract with Flock did include strong restrictions, and asked them to remove that data. I don’t see how we can guarantee that they will do that.

In light of these consequences, I can unequivocally say that mass surveillance by anyone should not be allowed in our city. And I implore the Council to implement stringent policies forbidding mass surveillance by any party. No one needs to know where I am at all times except for me.

Kamryn Stringfield Hello. Kamryn Stringfield, I’m an organizer with the Party for Socialism and Liberation.

First off, of course, thank you to (City Manager) Sarah (Medary) for making the right decision and terminating the contract. You corrected your mistake for March, and I appreciate you doing that before you retire. This is a victory for all of the people of Eugene and Springfield who have packed these meetings for months, demanding an end to Flock.

To all those here and at home who helped in that effort: I cannot thank you enough. You deserve the overwhelming majority of the credit for this win. And it shows once again that when we organize and fight, we win. All that being said, you know, this should have never happened. And so much of our time and energy and resources have been wasted on the Flock issue, while our community suffers with other crises, and our community was put in danger throughout the whole process with Flock.

Part of the problem which led to this is the virtually unchecked unilateral power that we’ve given to the city manager, especially when it comes to contracting. We need to seriously look at charter reform to fundamentally change the city government and eliminate the city manager position.

Look, this is the last meeting of the year, and we have much work to do in 2026. Let the lessons of 2025 guide us. Let the general dysfunction and failure of this city government this year lead us as people to fight to change it. Let the terror from ICE this year lead us to become steadfast protectors of our immigrant community. Let the budget nightmare lead us to fight against MUPTEs (multiunit property tax exemptions) and tax the wealthy to prevent this same crisis in 2027.

Lastly, let this Flock victory remind you that no matter how insurmountable the local establishment politics seems, sometimes there is no issue in this community that we can’t address by organizing and mobilizing our friends, coworkers, and neighbors. Who has the power? We have the power. What kind of power? People power. Good night.

Ken Willis Ken Willis, and I wanted to say thank you for canceling the contract. If I could have your attention, please.

Ms. Medary, I appreciate the fact that you canceled the contract, and everything’s going to be pulled out by December. But I do need you to understand that that action traumatized a significant chunk of the city, including me. I made it known at the beginning of this that I have a very autistic child that is extremely difficult and as truncated a lot of what my family can do, and those cameras put a squeeze on my family. That hurt.

The fact that I have had to dedicate so much time to this means my wife has been single-handedly dealing with this stress. I know that the decision you made to sign up for Flock was not done in a way that was meant to harm people, but it did. I want you to acknowledge that, at least in some form, that it did do a lot of harm.

You’ve signed off on it and made sure that that’s no longer the case. And I greatly appreciate that. But one of the things we’re going to have to talk about in January is accountability. And that accountability is going to have to be: What do we do with Chris? I said when this was said and done, that we were going to have to have a real serious talk about Chris Skinner and whether or not he’s the right man for the job.

And the level of arrogance, willful ignorance, not communicating with the public—the amount of information we threw at him is unacceptable. It just is. So we are going to have that talk in January.

The other thing we need to talk about is a technology review board moving forward when it comes to technological development and its implementation in our city. And we’re running a budget deficit. So we’ve got to do this and find the money. What happened with Flock can never happen again under any circumstances. I’d like the board to seriously consider a technology review review board moving forward. And, man, I don’t want to do this again.

Kristin Kessler My name is Kristin Kessler and I want to say thank you to any representative that influenced the chief of police and city manager in their decision to cancel Eugene Police Department’s contract with Flock. It is heartening that community protest was taken seriously.

But please do not stop listening to us now. As we say, cancellation of this contract is not enough. As long as the more than 50 cameras with license plate recognition capability remain installed, the threats to individual privacy and to public trust of the city remain in place.

We have every reason to believe that the Eugene Police Department remains resolved to use these authoritarian tools of data collection. Their memo regarding canceling the contract states, Eugene Police’s Automated License Plate Reading system experience has demonstrated the value of leveraging automated license plate recognition to aid in investigations.

If you had any conviction behind your argument you may have made to to cancel this contract, you must continue to fight Flock until the cameras are taken down, and there’s legislation protecting people from this sort of data collection in the future. A new city manager, police chief, or constitution of City Council that wants to use this once-defeated mass surveillance system deserves to deal with the obstacle of reinstallation via federal enforcement.

Any person who deviates from the white supremacist norms that this country was founded on is at risk of being deported or disappeared. If you care for someone in this situation and have contemplated something as simple as doing grocery runs for them, understand that data can be collected by Flock can and will be used against you.

It is foolish to rely on the idea that those doing nothing wrong have nothing to hide. Please consider that in 2025 the Supreme Court lifted restrictions that prevented ICE from using factors of race, language, or work location as basis for immigration stops to those fighting to prevent mass surveillance from defining how we operate in our city.

Your job is not done. Please do not be part of the reason that this threat literally remains hanging over our heads. Thank you.

Speaker Though Eugene and Springfield are canceling their contracts with Flock Safety, several public comments Dec. 8 ask how it is possible that such a contract could be approved by one unelected person.