This week Lynnwood became the first city in the state of Washington to officially terminate its contract with Flock and remove all its cameras to better protect the identities of everyone who has to live in Lynnwood.
“We here in Lynnwood want to protect all of our undocumented residents as well as those who want the fact that they had to live in Lynnwood for some reason to stay undocumented,” said City Councilmember Nick Coehlo, one of seven councilmembers who unanimously voted to terminate the Flock contract immediately even though the media attention the vote drew meant more people would know they not only live in Lynnwood but also hold public office there. “We don’t want to blow the cover of any resident here who works so hard to convince everyone they actually still live in Seattle. Because if we don’t, next thing you know, everyone will find out Edmonds College isn’t in Edmonds.”
The Council said that while they know personally there’s nothing wrong with living in a city that has some of the best Korean food around and a light rail station, it still poses a risk for that information to fall into the wrong hands.
“None of us want to end up like that liar from Shoreline when Seattleites found out he didn’t actually live in Seattle,” said Councilmember Isabel Mata. “Shutting down the surveillance state and protecting people’s privacy is important whether you were born here or not because no full-grown adult wants to be caught on camera doing bar crawls between Red Robin and Dave & Busters. So embarrassing, but at least not as embarrassing as moving forward with contracts for more surveillance cameras at such a time as this — can you imagine what kind of even more embarrassing city would? It couldn’t be Seattle.”
After the meeting, the Lynnwood City Council went to dinner relieved no cameras were on to document them presumably going to either Applebees, The Old Spaghetti Factory or Olive Garden.
