Kevin Coffman is an old man. He lives alone. His wife is dead. He is worried about the drug runners and human traffickers that could have made a home in Trinidad, just a few miles up from his home on Scenic Drive. Sometimes, people trespass on his property, check if he left anything unlocked. He doesn’t like that. They could steal things, he thinks, or harm me. His neighbors are much farther away than they once were, back when he lived in the city. He is too old to fight anyone off. Coffman is scared. 

So he installs some surveillance: a big security camera pointed down at the driveway. Some infrared cameras scattered around the property, so he can see what comes at night, the past 30 days worth of data safely stored off-site; if the house burns down, it’s safe. And a Flock camera that records every license plate on every car that passes by. It catalogues that data, and more: the vehicle’s dings and scratches, its make and model, any identifying marks, and sends it to Flock, where law enforcement agencies can check it out. He is doing him and his neighbors a favor, he thinks. It’ll help keep us all safe.

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Countless people have driven past the Flock camera at the intersection of Scenic Drive and Westhaven just up the street from Moonstone Beach since it was installed. The sheriff’s office has nine of their own (seven normal ones, another two that they can move around), but that one isn’t sheriff’s property. It’s privately owned by the owner of the house it’s next to, at 2206 Scenic Drive: Coffman, who bought the house in February last year. It’s not making him any friends, but he doesn’t care. 

“I’m a hardcore believer in them,” he told the Outpost. 

Coffman installed the camera late last year, and installed it has stayed. The county’s public works department sent him a notice in early June to remove it; at the time, the department’s director Tom Mattson told the Outpost he believed it would be removed within two weeks. It’s in the county’s right-of-way, just a few feet from his property. 

Coffman told the Outpost he never got the notice. Instead, he learned it was encroaching on county property when county supervisor Steve Madrone paid him a visit after receiving several complaints and told him it was installed illegally. (Madrone confirmed this.) 

Coffman didn’t intend to install it on county property. Flock employees put it there because that spot got it the best line of sight up and down the road, he said. He wanted it up on the hill nearer his house. It’s headed there next, and he has no plans to move it again.

The camera’s been an annoyance to local government and law enforcement since it was first reported. Sheriff William Honsal told the Humboldt County Board of Supervisors in early June that the sheriff’s office didn’t help Coffman install it; Honsal said that the company told him that a private citizen had set one up. Coffman offered to share the data with the sheriff’s office, Honsal said, but he turned him down. (Coffman said he never offered his camera’s data to Honsal, and it’s unclear if the sheriff’s department simply decided to stop looking at the data collected by Coffman’s camera on Flock’s website. He never communicated directly with Honsal, Coffman said. The sheriff’s office hasn’t yet responded to a request for comment.)

A flyer near Moonstone Beach asking people to protest Coffman’s camera. By Dezmond Remington.

Many people hate Flock cameras. Almost three dozen people railed against them during a board of supervisors meeting last month; a Change.org petition demanding the sheriff’s office to nix their Flock contract has almost 750 signatures. On a mailbox down the street from Coffman’s camera, someone hung up a poster telling people worried about the “ominous, black pole” to email the sheriff and Madrone. Public backlash forced dozens of cities to cancel their contracts. People make maps of them and crack jokes about breaking them open for copper. Coffman wasn’t spared. He claims that his camera has been vandalized at least once — a “two-strike dad” sending their kid to destroy the camera, he said. Flock was supposed to move it two months ago, he said, but their technicians are stretched thin because they’re busy making repairs on other damaged cameras. 

Coffman moved to Humboldt last year from Los Gatos, down in the Bay Area, where he’d worked in tech. He wanted to live somewhere that didn’t have any “vestiges” of the Bay, he said, none of its crime or obsession with technology. Even Mendocino was too close. But Humboldt wasn’t quite what he’d thought it’d be. He’d read up on some of the real estate industry’s demography reports, and thought there would be more “white-collar, middle-class manager” types here, he said. He thought he’d fit in. Humboldt is more blue collar than he’d been led to believe. 

“There’s a lot more working class than they’re letting on about, and some of their kids aren’t doing real good in school,” he said. “So I see that the demographic is a lot more diverse, a lot more mixed. There’s more people at the bottom than there are at the top, in contrast to some other ritzier neighborhoods down in the Bay Area.”

Several cities in the Bay have put up Flock cameras, and Coffman thought that they reduced crime. He wanted less crime where he lived, and he thought installing the camera would help both him and his neighbors. If something happened to them, or if a criminal came through, someone in law enforcement would know about it. Flock has claimed that 70% of crimes involve a vehicle, and Coffman believes them.

“I simply live in a house that has no neighbors on a busy street by a busy freeway, and I’ve had to take precautions to ensure my own security,” Coffman said. “And so, along with installing a home surveillance system, I installed a Flock safety camera. It’s just that simple.”

“By ensuring the safety of the women and the children and the men who lived around me, I helped myself be safe,” he continued. “It’s inherent in the word ‘flock,’ right? We’re the flock. We neighbors, against the predators.”

Coffman’s camera.

Who are the predators? Trespassers. Robbers. Random attackers. There’s plenty of crime on Scenic Drive, he said, and anyone who denies it is lying. There was lots of “street activity” on his road when he moved here, he said. He claimed to have seen teenage prostitutes. “I’m from the city,” he said. “I know what a hooker looks like.” There also could be drug traffickers in Trinidad, he said, who use the beautiful town as a rendezvous point, coming up from Latin America to do business in the Emerald Triangle, “running all sorts of things through this county.” He has lots of vulnerable neighbors, he said, and the camera shows the would-be criminals that they’re not easy targets. They’ll go somewhere where there’s “easier picking,” he said.

“Now I’m not pointing any fingers at any of my neighbors,” he said. “Now, who owns the VRBOs? Who owns the Airbnbs? Who are the people that allow these strangers to come to my community and hang out for a week and invite their friends from the local area? Are they all on the up and up? Are they legit?”

Other Westhaven residents would appreciate the extra eyeball, he thought, and perhaps it’ll at least deter criminals from coming down his way. If a neighbor isn’t a criminal, they have nothing to worry about, he said. Law enforcement won’t pay attention to them. Even if the sheriff’s office isn’t looking at his camera’s data, Coffman thinks that it’d be useful to the other agencies that could access it. 

Coffman does not understand why people are mad at him, why they have vandalized the camera and petitioned for its removal. Yes, the camera is on public property, and the public didn’t ask for a private citizen to put it there. He gets why that could make someone mad. But it’ll soon be on his land, and then it is 100 percent up to him if he keeps it or not. People who don’t like the constant surveillance must live in neighborhoods where help is always nearby, Coffman said. They have safety in numbers. There wouldn’t be any witnesses around if he was attacked. There aren’t always police nearby. He thinks these factors make his camera an invaluable asset. Besides, the data gets deleted eventually, he said. His camera isn’t part of a system that stockpiles information about every random citizen. He thinks that the backlash isn’t coming from the majority. 

Long ago, he wanted to be famous. He became a performer, wanted to make it big. Eventually, he gave it up in favor of making his name working at Fortune 500 companies. He wasn’t all that interesting, he decided, and whatever worries he had about public opinion died along with his desire for fame. 

“The opinion of the crowd is not what I am considering,” Coffman said. “Whether they like me or not is irrelevant.” 

If someone has a problem with the camera, don’t vandalize it, he said. Sue him. He’d prefer it.