Chandler police remove Flock Safety camera near elementary school mid-meeting
The short version: Chandler PD yanked a Flock camera near an elementary school mid-meeting after public pushback exposed officials' own uncertainty about where these cameras actually are.
Our Take
Credit to ABC15 Arizona for catching this one live: a police official claiming ignorance about a camera's placement near a school, then watching that camera disappear mid-meeting once residents started asking pointed questions. That sequence tells you almost everything you need to know about how these ALPR rollouts actually work in practice. Decisions get made quietly, deployment maps live in a vendor's dashboard rather than any public record, and the people who are supposed to be accountable for the system often can't tell you where the cameras are until the public forces the issue.
This isn't really a story about one camera near one school in Chandler. It's a story about the default posture of departments running Flock Safety networks: deploy first, explain later, and hope nobody asks too many hard questions about a device parked a few hundred feet from where kids walk to class. When a city official has to say "I am not aware" about a camera in their own jurisdiction, that's not a gap in communication — that's a gap in oversight, and it's exactly the kind of blind spot that lets these networks expand without the scrutiny they deserve.
If you want to see what's actually been deployed near you, check our camera map, and if your city council is quietly approving this stuff without public input, our take-action page has steps for showing up before the cameras go in, not after.
This is DeFlock The USA’s original commentary. The video above is the work of ABC15 Arizona, published on YouTube — full credit to the creator.