Your Local Police Are the Loudest Voice for Flock Cameras and That Tells You Everything

Our Take

Rob Benson is onto something that we harp on constantly here: follow who shows up to the city council meeting. When a town debates installing Flock Safety cameras, it's rarely a grassroots movement of worried residents demanding more surveillance. It's the police chief, the union rep, and sometimes a Flock sales rep sitting right behind them. The people asking for less oversight of their own authority are the loudest voice in the room for more surveillance of everyone else. That's not a coincidence, it's a pattern.

This matters because ALPR systems don't just watch for stolen cars and Amber Alerts. They build a searchable, retroactive map of where every driver has been, and that data sits in a database that cops can query without a warrant, often with minimal audit trails and zero input from the communities being watched. When the same institution asking for expanded power is also the one writing the policy on how that power gets used, you've got a fox-guarding-the-henhouse problem baked into the system from day one.

If your local department is pushing for cameras, that's exactly the moment to show up and ask hard questions instead of leaving the floor to them. Check our camera map to see what's already watching your streets, and head to our take-action page for tools to push back at your next council meeting. Credit to Rob Benson for putting the irony on camera.