A man in a full Darth Vader costume approached the microphone at a San Diego City Council committee hearing this week and delivered a sarcasm-drenched endorsement of the city’s Flock surveillance cameras, telling members “the Emperor is a fan of Flock.”
The costumed speaker, addressed only as “Darth Vader” by committee staff, brought the character’s trademark heavy breathing into the council chamber’s microphone during public comment at Wednesday’s Public Safety and Livable Neighborhoods Committee meeting, according to a Fox News report on the stunt. “This is what the emperor needs,” he told the panel.
He went on to argue the roughly 500 Flock license-plate readers the San Diego Police Department has installed citywide would help authorities track down “rebel scum” moving between playgrounds, pools and gymnasiums, and would help locate “Luke Skywalker” and a rebel base on the ice planet Hoth. He also said he needed the cameras “so I can stalk my ex-girlfriend” — a line that Axios reported this week tracks a real pattern of misuse complaints nationwide, including in Reynoldsburg, Ohio, where two officers resigned last week amid an investigation after one was found to have used the technology more than 40 times to track a former domestic partner.
The theatrics landed amid a real fight over the city’s surveillance footprint. San Diego police say the cameras are used strictly for investigations and that plate data is purged after 30 days unless tied to an active case. Axios reported in April that SDPD had signed a separate, undisclosed contract in December for a Flock product called Nova, a platform designed to integrate plate-reader data with 911 calls, digital police records and other investigative sources into a single search tool. SDPD has said it never activated Nova and has no plans to use it, though the contract remains in place.
That April report also found the contract gave SDPD access to “open source intelligence” and data from other law-enforcement agencies, and that the city’s Privacy Advisory Board never got a chance to review it before it was signed, because police determined it was exempt from the city’s surveillance oversight ordinance.
Flock has separately announced it will cut its default data-retention window from 30 days to seven days and, by the end of 2026, will require officers to log a case number before searching its database — changes the company made amid mounting backlash nationally. The man in the Vader costume has not been identified.
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