Flock cameras keep us safe
The short version: A Jersey Goy video touts Flock cameras as a safety tool, but the 'keeps us safe' framing skips over the real trade-offs of blanket ALPR surveillance.
Our Take
Jersey Goy's video makes the case that Flock cameras keep communities safe, a claim we hear constantly from police departments and city councils rolling out these systems. It's a tidy pitch, but "safety" is doing a lot of heavy lifting when the underlying technology is a network that logs every passing vehicle, regardless of suspicion, and stores that data for departments and, often, outside agencies to query.
We're not disputing that license plate reads can occasionally help close a case. The problem is the framing that treats mass, warrantless tracking of every driver as an unambiguous public good with no downside. Flock's own transparency portals and audit logs have repeatedly shown searches unrelated to the original marketing pitch, and once a camera network exists, mission creep is the rule, not the exception.
Credit to Jersey Goy for putting the pro-Flock argument out there plainly, since it's worth seeing the case as departments actually make it. But before accepting that these cameras equal safety, check whether one is watching your own street on our camera map, and see what you can do about it on our take action page.
This is DeFlock The USA’s original commentary. The video above is the work of Jersey Goy, published on YouTube — full credit to the creator.