DeFlock Ridgecrest

👨‍⚖️The City Council meeting was disappointing. Blades responded that Flock is doing their own penetration testing of their cameras. Anyone who knows anything about test and evaluation would laugh at this. You never let the company that owns the product give the certification of that product. The cameras were tested by an outside source and were hacked. No excuses, the system has security vulnerabilities and needs to be shut down.

📋 So far we have 49 signatures on change.org for our DeFlock Ridgecrest petition. We are going to need a lot more to make an impression with the city council. This council is uninterested in engaging in public comment. We’ve been attending these meetings for nearly a year now. We’ve watched people voice their concerns and most of the time the council rolls their eyes. By reading the room, one would think that all the speakers were crazy. But then I realize, there is a possibility that the people have been driven mad by having to shout into a void. They usually don’t care enough or are too scared to respond on record.

✍️ If you haven’t signed yet, please take a moment to do so. Click Here. After you sign the petition, Change.org will ask if you would like to donate. This is not required and donations are unlikely to get local signatures. Do not donate. Instead please share the petition with other people in Ridgecrest.

Protests

📣This Saturday from 10am-12pm we will focus on Flock to recruit more people to sign our petition. I will have a clipboard and form for those who do not want to sign online. Please make protest signs against Flock to help draw attention to this issue.

If we are able to get the contract suspended, not only will we be doing the right thing for the people who work on base due to the security vulnerabilities, but we are also fighting ICE’s ability to track people in our town. There have been reports of the system being used to track migrant workers and protestors in other parts of the country.

This Saturday will be our last protest for 2025. I’d like to encourage people to attend the City Council meeting on December 17th to put additional pressure on the city. Mike will be taking lead on this campaign against the Flock system and will be speaking at every council meeting until we get results.

Survey results

📝We are nearly evenly split with continuing on our regular schedule or moving to the 1st Saturday of the month. We may need more discussion on this.

For now, while we are taking on Flock, I would suggest that we split efforts between protests and city council meetings. City council meetings are the 1st and 3rd Wednesdays of the month at 6pm. If we could protest the 1st Saturday and attend city council meetings, we believe this would be an effective strategy for putting pressure on the city. Please pick one of the two meetings to attend, we will be there every meeting.

Mass National Protests

We will of course do all mass national protests. Mass national protests are defined as multi-collation, and promoted by Indivisible 45 days in advance. There are many national protests nearly every weekend due to the fact that there are many national nonprofit organizations and unions. We do not have the bandwidth to support all of these and the word about them usually doesn’t hit the press until a few days before.

📅I am anticipating that the next No Kings will be on President’s Day, but this is just speculation at this point. There has been no talk in the leadership meetings when the next one will be.

January

Next month we will be doing an adjustment to the schedule to accommodate New Years vacation plans and encourage participation on MLK Jr Day.

• Wednesday Jan. 7th: City Council, 6pm
• Saturday Jan. 10: Protest, 10am-12pm
• Monday Jan. 19th: MLK Jr Remembrance, 11:30am at the Kerr McGee Center
• Wednesday Jan. 21st: City Council, 6pm