A leaked coaching guide that Flock Safety hands to police points other departments toward Oakland and Richmond — two East Bay cities where residents packed hearings to oppose its license-plate cameras, and lost the vote anyway.

Flock Safety, facing a year of scrutiny over its automated license-plate reader network, has been coaching the police who buy its cameras on how to sell them to skeptical city councils. Its playbook holds up Oakland and Richmond as success stories — but in both Bay Area cities the public turned out against the cameras and councils approved them anyway on narrow votes. The document's core advice, to "own the narrative" and steer complaints from "mass surveillance" toward "audit and accountability," is the same framing critics say downplays the documented abuses the network has already enabled.

The playbook was obtained and published by 404 Media and localized by two East Bay nonprofit newsrooms, The Oaklandside and its sister site Richmondside (external source, opens in a new tab). It teaches officers to get ahead of the public — to lobby city managers and council members privately before public comment, rehearse their pitch, and recast "mass surveillance" complaints as questions of oversight. What makes the Bay Area examples sting is that in both cities residents turned out in force against the cameras, and the councils approved them anyway on narrow or contested votes. Flock now resells those outcomes to police elsewhere as proof the method works.

Flock Safety, the Atlanta company behind the automated license-plate readers bolted to poles across the Bay Area, has spent the year on defense. So it started coaching its customers — the police — on how to go on offense.

The guide, circulated alongside a webinar Flock held in May titled "How to Speak to City Councils," was reported by 404 Media in early August. Its central lesson is to never let a council meeting be the first place officials hear the case for the cameras. Brief the city manager first, the guide tells police. Meet council members before the vote. Walk in with a "carefully scripted presentation." The slogan the reporters pulled from the document: "own the narrative before someone else does."

The handbook also tells officers not to argue with residents who call the technology mass surveillance. "Don't avoid the concept of mass surveillance because you're not going to convince opponents that it's not," it says, quoting Flock strategist Jamie Hudson. The recommended move instead is to pivot to audit logs and use policies — and to reframe the money question away from the price of the cameras and toward "the cost of unresolved crime."

The guide, circulated alongside a webinar Flock held in May titled "How to Speak to City Councils," was reported by 404 Media in early August.

Two of the case studies Flock uses to show this working sit in the East Bay. The Oaklandside reported that it registered for the May webinar to watch how Flock talks to police, but was denied access.

In Oakland, the guide credits police with turning the debate around by demonstrating that the cameras could be "audited, reviewed, and held accountable," and even quotes an unnamed "former skeptic" who came around. The scene on the ground was messier: the city's own Privacy Advisory Commission and rows of residents opposed the purchase. The Oaklandside reported that the City Council approved it anyway last December after a long, heated session — a 7–1 vote for a $2.25 million contract covering 293 cameras, with District 3 Councilmember Carroll Fife the lone dissent. Oakland's police department skipped the webinar entirely, a department spokesperson told the outlet.

Richmond is an even odder trophy. The guide frames the city as won over by "a clear connection between governance, accountability, and measurable public safety outcomes." Yet, as Richmondside reported (external source, opens in a new tab), the city had switched its cameras off in late 2025, after the police chief found a "national lookup" tool that let outside agencies query Richmond's plate data — a possible breach of the city's sanctuary rules. When the Council voted 4–3 in March to reactivate them through year's end, it bolted on a $2 million contract carrying a $290,000 penalty if Flock's data leaks again. Council member Sue Wilson accused Chief Timothy Simmons of "cherry-picking" the numbers — 274 arrests, 259 recovered stolen cars — he cited to make his case.

Civil-liberties advocates say the document simply confirms how these fights actually play out. The Electronic Frontier Foundation's director of strategic campaigns, Sarah T. Hamid, reviewed it for 404 Media and said Flock "isn't just selling surveillance, it's scripting the public case for buying it." She argued the company treats public trust as a messaging problem, keeping officials fixed on accountability in the abstract rather than the abuses its network has already enabled.

Those abuses aren't hypothetical in San Francisco, where police found federal and out-of-state agencies had run hundreds of illegal queries against the city's Flock network — the very sort of misuse the playbook's "audit and accountability" language is built to steer around. Asked about the training, Flock spokesperson Trevor Chandler told The Oaklandside the session was meant only for public safety agencies and disclosed nothing new or secret. The company declined to comment for the outlets' stories.