Image of Visalia Flock cameras on a map of the city.
Map images from https://deflock.org/

“I always feel like somebody’s watching me
And I have no privacy (oh, oh)
I always feel like somebody’s watching me
Who’s playing tricks on me?” Somebody’s Watching Me – Rockwell

London is a city well known for extensive video monitoring by CCTV systems. London Metro Police have eyes across the city. Jurisdictions in the United States are following suit, bit by bit. Starting last year (2025), Visalia jumped on that bandwagon, too, with (at this writing) thirteen Flock cameras. Not to the extent of London, but every place has to start somewhere, right?

I was a bit surprised when I checked out the https://deflock.org/ map for the Visalia area. I was expecting to see 13 cameras under the control of the Visalia Police Department. I didn’t expect to see seven of them covering the College of the Sequoias, four at the Packwood Creek Shopping Center, and four at the Willow Creek Shopping Center. (I don’t think those are for VPD. I’m sure they’re under the control of the property owners. Especially since all the cameras there are pointing inwards to the properties, and not out towards the street.)

The City of Visalia page on the Flock website is https://transparency.flocksafety.com/visalia-ca-pd. It gives some interesting information on Visalia’s system. At the time of this post, 13 cameras had logged 344,972 “vehicles detected” in the past 30 days.

As you’re running around Visalia, be sure and smile, because you may be on Candid Camera!

Some caveats:

These are not real-time video streams. They take still images and store them on a cloud server. Subscribers like Visalia Police Department can log in and download images. So can any other law enforcement agency in California. Each log-in does require an ID, and a case or tracking number to be registered for auditing. No agency outside of California, not even a Federal agency, has permission to access images from Visalia’s files. (There was apparently a data breach last year, where a third-party vendor to Flock changed a setting, allowing unauthorized users nationwide access to California data. Flock says that error has been fixed. We assume so that it can’t happen again. The bad PR, though, convinced Oxnard and Ventura PDs to suspend their use of the system.)

Individual contracts with private companies, like the property owners of the shopping centers, may be different. I have not heard if they restrict access, limit the time data is held in the cloud, or what other protections are in place. So, when you’re visiting the shopping centers here in Visalia that have installed the system, be sure and smile as you drive into the parking lot. Click. You’re in the system!

Farmersville has even gotten into the action.

So what do you think? Government overreach, creeping more and more into our lives? Or completely harmless safety programs to aid in traffic control and law enforcement?