San Francisco has a surveillance problem, and it's rolling out on our streets one camera at a time.

The city's contract with Flock Safety — the company behind those sleek license plate readers popping up across neighborhoods — deserves way more scrutiny than it's getting. These automated cameras capture and store license plate data on every vehicle that passes, building a massive database of where San Franciscans drive, when, and how often.

Let's be clear: nobody here is soft on crime. Public safety is a fundamental function of government — arguably the fundamental function. We want cops to catch carjackers and solve hit-and-runs just as much as anyone. But there's a difference between targeted law enforcement and dragnet surveillance of an entire city's movements.

Here's what should concern every liberty-minded San Franciscan:

The data problem. Flock Safety doesn't just capture plates of suspects. It captures everyone's plates. Your morning commute, your trip to the dispensary, your visit to a political rally — all logged, timestamped, and stored. Who has access? For how long? Under what oversight? These are questions the Board of Supervisors should be grilling city officials about, not rubber-stamping contracts.

The cost problem. These systems aren't cheap, and once a city signs on, it becomes dependent on a private company's infrastructure for basic policing functions. That's a recurring expense that grows over time — classic government vendor lock-in funded by your tax dollars.

The accountability problem. Flock Safety is a private company. That means FOIA requests get murkier, oversight gets weaker, and the public has less visibility into how their data is being used.

We're not saying surveillance technology has zero place in law enforcement. We're saying San Francisco is sleepwalking into a contract that trades civil liberties for convenience without a serious public debate about the tradeoffs.

Demand transparency. Demand sunset clauses. Demand real oversight. Because once the cameras are everywhere, good luck getting them taken down.