Flock LPR Help Catch Triple Homicide Suspect
The short version: Flock's own promotional video touts a quick multi-state arrest in a Utah triple homicide, but a single dramatic case isn't evidence that blanket ALPR surveillance is proportionate or safe.
Our Take
This clip comes straight from Flock Safety's marketing team, not an independent investigator, so treat it accordingly. A brutal triple homicide and a fast arrest make for a compelling highlight reel, and we're not going to pretend catching a violent suspect is a bad outcome. But a company cutting its own trailer of a win-the-headline case is not the same thing as an audit of how often this network is used, misused, or simply logged without any crime at all.
The quiet part this video skips: catching one suspect across three states required that Flock's cameras were already scanning and storing the plates of hundreds of thousands of innocent drivers in Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, and Colorado who had nothing to do with this case. That's the actual tradeoff every community adopting this system is making — permanent, searchable location tracking for everyone, justified after the fact by the rare case where it helps solve something serious. Most of what gets swept up is just... everyone's daily movements, retained and queryable by police departments with wildly inconsistent policies on access, retention, and sharing.
If your town has these cameras, you deserve to know it, and you deserve records on how the data is actually used, not just the success stories Flock chooses to publish. Check our camera map to see what's already deployed near you, and visit our take-action page if you want to push your local government for real transparency and limits.
This is DeFlock The USA’s original commentary. The video above is the work of Flock, published on YouTube — full credit to the creator.