Debate over Flock cameras in Apex
The short version: CBS 17's Apex segment shows the same old script: police tout 'public safety,' residents raise privacy alarms, and nobody answers what happens to the data.
Our Take
CBS 17's local report on Apex, North Carolina gives airtime to a conversation that's happening in city council chambers all over the country: police departments adopt Flock Safety's ALPR network, cite a handful of solved cases, and residents start asking uncomfortable questions nobody in uniform wants to fully answer. Credit to the CBS 17 team for actually putting the debate on camera instead of just running a press release with sirens in the background.
Here's what rarely makes the cut in these segments: Flock cameras aren't just reading your plate when a crime happens nearby. They're logging every vehicle that passes, building a searchable timeline of where you drive, when, and how often — whether or not you've ever been a suspect in anything. That data doesn't stay local either. It can be queried by other agencies, shared across jurisdictions, and retained well beyond the window where it's actually useful for solving the crime it was supposedly installed for. 'We caught a car thief' is a much easier sell than 'we built a mass surveillance dragnet that happens to occasionally catch a car thief.'
Apex isn't unique — it's one node in a rapidly expanding national network, and that's exactly why local debates like this one matter. Check our camera map to see what's already watching your own town, and if you want to push back at your next council meeting, our take-action page has the tools to get started.
This is DeFlock The USA’s original commentary. The video above is the work of CBS 17, published on YouTube — full credit to the creator.