The OCP Doctrine: Privatizing Police Surveillance in Palm Bay
The short version: Thomas Gaume's "OCP Doctrine" video uses RoboCop's corporate-policing nightmare to frame how Flock Safety's vendor-owned ALPR network operates in Palm Bay with little public oversight.
Our Take
Thomas Gaume draws a sharp line from 1987's dystopian satire to 2024's actual policy memos, and the comparison isn't as hyperbolic as it sounds. When a private company owns the cameras, controls the servers, sets the retention policies, and sells access back to police departments as a subscription, you've effectively outsourced a core government function — surveillance of public streets — to a vendor whose business model depends on expanding its footprint, not protecting your privacy.
Palm Bay is just one data point in a pattern we track across the country: city councils approving Flock contracts with minimal debate, little public comment, and almost no independent audit of how the data gets used, shared, or retained. The "who's holding the keys" question matters because private vendors aren't bound by the same records laws, accountability structures, or constitutional constraints that we at least nominally expect from police themselves. That gap is exactly where mission creep lives.
Credit to Gaume for putting the RoboCop frame to good use — fiction has a way of making bureaucratic surveillance expansion legible in a way spec sheets never do. If you want to see whether this is happening in your own town, check our camera map, and if you find a system with no public oversight attached, our take-action page has steps for pushing back at the city council level.
This is DeFlock The USA’s original commentary. The video above is the work of Thomas Gaume, published on YouTube — full credit to the creator.