DeFlock St. Pete is not formally affiliated with the national DeFlock movement or DeFlock.org, although local organizers were inspired by that work and have communicated with people involved with the national effort, Schira added.
The local group’s immediate goal is straightforward: cancel St. Petersburg’s contract with Flock and remove the cameras.
But Schira said organizers don’t want the city to simply replace Flock with another company offering similar automatic license plate-reader technology.
He pointed to recent examples of cities ending Flock contracts only to enter agreements with other ALPR companies.
“All the other companies that do this, that do the automatic license plate readers, are more or less in the same boat,” he said, adding that without stronger government oversight and regulation, the technology shouldn’t be used.