Flock Safety Excuse #5: Using Victims to Justify Tyranny

Our Take

Jon Bouche's latest in his "Flock Safety Excuse" series digs into a familiar playbook: when people question why a private company is logging every car that passes through their town, the answer is almost always some version of "but think of the victims." It's an emotionally effective move, and it's also a distraction from the actual policy question, which is whether a permanent, warrantless surveillance grid is an acceptable price for the promise of solving crimes after the fact.

Using real victims and real tragedies to short-circuit debate isn't unique to ALPRs, but it's especially potent here because nobody wants to look like they don't care about a missing kid or a hit-and-run. The problem is that sympathy for a victim doesn't answer basic questions about retention periods, data sharing with federal agencies, audit trails, or what happens when this infrastructure gets misused, hacked, or repurposed for things far removed from the case that justified it in the first place. Bouche's framing is a useful reminder that good intentions and good policy are not the same thing.

This is exactly why we keep pushing people to look past the pitch and at the hardware itself. Check our map to see how much of this infrastructure has already gone up in your area, and if you want to push back locally, our take-action page has concrete steps for talking to city council before the next camera goes up.