Hialeah woman accused of repeatedly striking dog in apartment building

Our Take

Credit to WPLG Local 10 for this one — it's a reminder that not all cameras are created equal. A front desk employee reviewing building surveillance footage spotted apparent animal abuse and called police. That's a private property owner using a private camera system for a specific, legitimate purpose: keeping tenants and their pets safe inside a building they chose to live in.

That's a world apart from what we track at DeFlock. Flock Safety's ALPR network isn't a landlord checking a hallway camera after a complaint — it's a nationwide grid of plate-reading cameras logging every car that passes, whether or not anyone suspects wrongdoing, often without local residents ever voting on it. One is a tool a building owner controls and points narrowly. The other is a dragnet that follows ordinary people's movements by default.

Stories like this get cited by surveillance boosters as proof that 'more cameras equal more justice.' But the lesson here is scale and consent, not just cameras. A lobby camera watching a lobby is nothing like a statewide network watching every license plate on every street. If you want to see how far that network has spread near you, check our camera map, and if you'd rather not have your daily movements logged by default, see what you can do at take action.