Public hearing explores Flock Safety tech amid privacy and misuse concerns | WSOC-TV
The short version: Charlotte residents and officials pressed Flock Safety on privacy and misuse at a public hearing — exactly the kind of scrutiny every city considering ALPRs needs.
Our Take
Credit to WSOCTV9 for covering this one straight: a room full of Charlotte residents and elected officials asking Flock Safety representatives hard questions instead of rubber-stamping another camera contract. That's how this is supposed to work. Too often these deals get approved in a consent-agenda footnote with zero public input, so a dedicated hearing on privacy and misuse concerns is already a win for transparency, regardless of what Flock's sales team says in the room.
The pattern here is familiar. A vendor pitches a surveillance network as a narrow tool for solving specific crimes, but the underlying system logs the movements of every driver, not just suspects, and that data can be searched, shared, or subpoenaed well outside its original purpose. Charlotte isn't the first city to wrestle with this, and it won't be the last. The real question city council should be asking isn't whether Flock's tech works as advertised, it's who gets access to that data, how long it's retained, and what stops it from becoming a permanent tracking ledger on every resident.
If you're in Charlotte or anywhere else wondering whether your neighborhood already has these cameras watching, check our camera map to see what's been documented near you, and if you want to push back on a local deployment, our take-action resources walk through how to make your voice heard before the next hearing happens in your city.
This is DeFlock The USA’s original commentary. The video above is the work of WSOCTV9, published on YouTube — full credit to the creator.