The Truth About Flock Safety: AI Surveillance or Public Safety?

Our Take

Credit to Lisa Cabrera for pulling together a sprawling story into one watch: Flock Safety's cameras now blanket 49 states, and the pushback is coming from both sides of the aisle at once. That's the part worth sitting with. When Democratic mayors and Republican governors are independently souring on the same company's product, it's not a partisan talking point — it's a sign that the surveillance infrastructure itself is the problem, regardless of who's holding the login credentials.

The details she highlights — ACLU-documented abuse cases, the ICE data-sharing pipeline, cities actually ripping contracts up after the fact — are exactly the pattern we track here. A camera sold as a tool to find stolen cars becomes a de facto national vehicle-tracking network the moment it's networked, queried across jurisdictions, and handed to federal agencies with zero public debate about where that line gets drawn. 'Making you safer' and 'making you watched' aren't opposites; with ALPRs they're usually the same sentence.

If this video left you wondering whether there's a Flock reader near you, check our camera map to see what's been documented in your area, and if you want to push back on a local contract, our take-action page has the steps cities that already canceled used to get there.