San Francisco's contract for its 400-plus Flock surveillance cameras lapses in February 2027 — early in the next supervisor's term. In District 8, the candidates who've gone on record break three-to-one against renewal, and the lone supporter is the field's best-known candidate, whose front-runner status has been shaken by a sexual-assault allegation he denies.

The Flock license-plate reader network is the most contested piece of San Francisco's surveillance build-out, and the next Board of Supervisors will decide whether it survives. SFPD's roughly $3.9 million contract with Flock Safety runs through Feb. 19, 2027 — so the supervisor elected this November inherits the renewal question almost immediately. A Mission Local candidate questionnaire has now put the District 8 field on record, and the answers read as a preview of how a swing seat might vote on the city's most-scrutinized camera program.

The stakes are concrete. The city rolled out the readers (external source, opens in a new tab) in March 2024 and has since grown the network past 400 cameras. In that window, outside and federal agencies ran more than 1.6 million improper queries against San Francisco's plate data between August 2024 and February 2025 — at least 19 of them flagged as tied to Immigration and Customs Enforcement — per the San Francisco Standard (external source, opens in a new tab), whose reporting anchors a February 2026 class-action suit. The problem recurred this year: a May compliance audit caught another 299 improper federal and out-of-state searches (external source, opens in a new tab) moving through a regional intelligence hub. State law forbids handing automated plate data to out-of-state law enforcement for any reason.

Against that record, three of the four District 8 candidates with clear stances told Mission Local's "Meet the Candidates" questionnaire (external source, opens in a new tab) they want the program gone.

Darshini Patel, who worked on the Obama and Harris campaigns, was the bluntest about the mechanics: she said she would vote against renewal when the deal lapses, calling a system that hasn't demonstrably cut crime one that isn't working. Her pitch is to move the money into brighter streets, storefront activation, late-night programming, and crisis-response teams instead of cameras that, she argues, can chart who visits a clinic, a church, or an LGBTQ+ space.

Against that record, three of the four District 8 candidates with clear stances told Mission Local's "Meet the Candidates" questionnaire they want the program gone.

Gary McCoy, once a staffer to Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi, said he has turned away money from Flock and its lobbyists, and cast privacy as a safety issue in its own right at a moment when, in his framing, immigrants are being seized off city streets. Patent attorney Michael Nguyen landed in the same column, warning the network amounts to mass surveillance.

The lone supporter is Manny Yekutiel — the Manny's café owner and Civic Joy Fund co-founder who entered the race with the deepest endorsement roster, from termed-out incumbent Rafael Mandelman and Assemblymember Catherine Stefani to former Mayor Willie Brown and the pro-tech group GrowSF. He backs the cameras, he wrote, but only "with real guardrails," saying he'd pull his support the moment the footage reaches ICE or the federal government, and demanding hard limits on how long data is kept and who can see it.

That front-runner status is no longer clean. In late June, a political organizer publicly accused Yekutiel of groping and assaulting him in 2020; within days, Attorney General Rob Bonta, Rep. Lateefah Simon and Supervisor Myrna Melgar withdrew their endorsements (external source, opens in a new tab). Yekutiel has denied the allegation, telling reporters "what is being described did not happen" and calling it politically motivated because it surfaced six years later. The endorsers named above have not pulled back — so he still leads the field on paper — but the race's clearest Flock supporter is also its most contested candidate.

His qualifier is where the questionnaire gets sharpest. Yekutiel's conditional yes rests on preventing precisely the federal access that has already breached the system twice — both the 1.6 million searches and the 299-query audit ran through channels the city itself had authorized. His opponents treat that history as the argument against the cameras: once the database exists, policing who reaches into it has proven hard.

Seven candidates answered in all, and a fuller accounting would pin down the other three. But the four clearest positions already map a real choice for a district stretching from the Castro to Glen Park. The evidence on effectiveness is genuinely split — a working paper out this month found vehicle theft fell where cameras were installed, while two studies of patrol-mounted readers near hotspots found no overall drop, one noting only that the tools helped recover stolen cars. The calendar is not split: the renewal vote arrives in the winner's first months.