The Monster With 100,000 Eyes; or Who’s Watching Fresno’s Watchmen?

The Ancient Greeks had a name for the thing with eyes bolted to light poles all across Fresno. They called him Argus the All-Seeing, a giant whose whole body was studded with a hundred eyes. 

The gods set him to a single task: guard Io, a young woman who had been transformed against her will and could not escape. Argus was the perfect jailer precisely because he never fully slept.

Today, Argus lives in Fresno and all across the nation. He is smaller and quieter and runs on solar panels, but he is the same creature. 

In Fresno, he has eyes from La Panaderia Natalie on Olive to Woodward Park and along the inner city arterials. Each, wired into a national body that has swelled past 100,000 cameras. 

He logs your plate, your make, your dents and the hour you passed. He does not blink because, like the giant, he does not have to. 

And on July 20, several concerned community members filed onto the basketball court at the Ted C. Wills Community Center, where they were met by Fresno’s police chief, Mindy Casto,  who stood up to reassure the packed room that the monster is friendly. 

“Damage Control, Not Community”

The community meeting took place roughly two years after installation of the cameras. An attendee who introduced themself as Apache expressed their concern that the department was practicing “damage control, not community.” 

Fresno Police Chief Mindy Casto seemingly agreed and suggested that perhaps the department should host community meetings sooner and not only when controversial issues have escalated.

The city council approved the roughly $1.6 million, three-year contract with Flock Safety, in 2024. a private company that has gained commercial success with their cameras, labeled as automatic license plate readers, or ALPRs. 

The contract was funded through the California Organized Retail Theft Prevention Grant Program, became operational by the end of 2024 and the contract will expire in March 2027. Any extension or continuation would require approval by the city council.

The department has stated that there is little to no funding available for continued operation of the cameras. At the public forum, Casto admitted the department had made no provisions for continued funding.

Fresno Police Chief Backs Flock With Statistics

Casto reported that Flock cameras had assisted 71% of the city’s homicide cases this year and 39% of its shootings. She also pointed out that the number of murders in Fresno decreased from 74 in 2020 to 22 last year. 

When questioned about the public’s perception of being monitored by so many cameras, Casto framed the night as a balance between “safety and liberty” beginning her speech with a quote from Benjamin Franklin: “Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.” Over the next hour, three attendees referenced the same quote.

In May 2025, an officer with the Johnson County Sheriff’s Office in Texas used a Flock terminal to search the company’s database for a female subject. The officer typed the reason for the search in plain text: “had an abortion, search for female.” The initial query scanned nearly 1,300 networks. 

The second scanned a full month of data across 6,809 networks and more than 83,000 cameras, including systems in states where abortion remains legal, such as Washington and Illinois. One officer, in one county, in a state where abortion is nearly banned, used a hundred-eyed giant to find one person across the country. 

The sheriff and Flock claimed the search was a welfare check, saying the family feared she would bleed to death. Records later obtained by the Electronic Frontier Foundation showed that the “death investigation,” which allegedly justified the hunt, did not begin until two weeks after the woman’s abortion. 

Prosecutors had already determined that no charges could be filed against anyone involved. Flock’s CEO dismissed 404 Media’s reporting as the work of an “activist journalist.” The eyes had already done their job.

A Texas search for a woman who had an abortion reached far beyond the Lone Star state—its trail turned up in the audit logs of the Mount Prospect, Illinois, Police Department. 

One resident asked Casto, “Under the current contract between Fresno and Flock, could an agency outside California use Fresno’s data to locate someone who had driven out of state for an abortion?” 

Casto answered that California law prohibits sharing data with agencies outside the state. Illinois law also prohibited such sharing. 

This creature does not read state lines. He was built to see beyond them, and so he does. The 100+ cameras now active in Fresno are not bound to Fresno alone. The same eyes that hunted that woman are the same ones that are popping up all around Fresno.

At one point in the evening, a resident asked Chief Casto how she could be certain Flock would not keep the data after the 30-day window when it is supposed to be deleted. She did not have an answer. She had a piece of paper.

You know who else had a piece of paper? Evanston, Illinois. When news reports indicated that outside agencies were using Evanston’s Flock data to search for immigration violations, and when the Illinois Secretary of State discovered that Flock had quietly allowed U.S. Customs and Border Protection to access Illinois camera feeds through a pilot program, contrary to state law. Evanston decided in August 2025 to cancel its contract and have all 19 of its cameras taken offline and removed. 

But, the beast wouldn’t die. Flock contested the cancellation and in September of last year, without the city’s permission, the company reinstalled the cameras. Evanston sent a cease-and-desist letter and covered the lenses with plastic bags. 

Two cameras remained on Evanston’s poles six months later, in spring 2026, while the contract languished in legal purgatory and the city continued to refuse to pay. 

A community of highly educated individuals, an organized group of concerned citizens with considerable resources, voted to kill the beast—but the eyes returned to stare from those very same poles. That is the warning. 

The beast does not disappear peacefully, and paper will not slow it. The hopeful side is that Evanston is not alone. Neighboring Oak Park canceled its contract. So did Denver, Colorado, and Austin, Texas. Arlington Heights shut off its cameras. Los Altos Hills pulled the plug on the cameras here in California; a Cleveland council committee voted down renewal; the LAPD put its own program on hold over questions about who owns the data. 

Springfield, Illinois, renewed its contract only after requiring new transparency and public-reporting provisions; As of the writing of this article, Fresno has not committed to meeting this bare minimum. City after city is coming to the same realization. However, each city fought tooth and nail to reach this decision, and some continue to fight.

HEADING

According to the account presented in the room, the Fresno Bee reported that there has been no independent review of the department in more than a year and the Fresno’s Office of Independent Review position remains vacant.  

When asked who holds the police accountable, Chief Casto candidly replied that they generally hold themselves accountable. That is how the department says it is supposed to work. 

An officer’s sergeant reviews the officer’s actions, and the department posts its own redacted audit results. When residents pointed out “the fox guarding the henhouse,” they were simply reading the organizational chart aloud.

This is not a department with a history of success it can rely on. In 2020, the California State Auditor investigated Fresno’s license plate camera program and identified problems, including data retained longer than necessary, data shared without sufficient justification, inadequate oversight and weak privacy and policy protections. 

Fresno failed this exact test before. It is now asking us to trust that its internal processes caught everything the second time. In other words, the giant has promised to watch itself, presumably while winking half of those eyes at the camera.

The statistics offered as reasons to trust the system also fail to fill the gaps. Yes, murders fell from 74 in 2020 to 22 last year and Casto credits Flock with “furthering” 71% of this year’s homicide cases. 

But “furthering” a case is not closing one, and she acknowledged, “it’s never any one thing.” At least one question, posed by a local business owner, would actually test whether her claim held up: What were the clearance rates before installation? Casto gave no answer. 

Harris County, Texas, operates roughly 3,700 cameras like the ones Fresno uses and still buried more than 500 people to homicide last year. For a giant that sees all, it sure does seem satisfying to just stand there and watch a lot of the time (that’ll be 1.5 million dollars by the way). 

The meeting that day came to an abrupt end, with over a dozen people robbed of their opportunity to voice their concerns. The police officers quickly tucked their tails and left while the sun set over downtown Fresno.

In the story, the god Hermes lulls all the eyes to sleep, slays the monster and frees Io. We cannot rely on that magic—that job falls to us ordinary people. 

The grant money that pays for the giant is running out, and the chief admitted future funding “hasn’t been discussed.” Renewal runs through the city budget, which means through the city council, which means through us. 

Will we allow our hard-earned money to create more horrors? If we are to do something about this we must show up and we must be relentless. Every one of us needs to tell our council members not to renew the contract and to bring the cameras down for good. Cities across the country  are learning, once you let the monster in, removing it is a fight.