Police department under fire after installing Flock cameras without informing the city

Our Take

Credit to FOX2548 and WIProud for digging into a story that keeps repeating itself in town after town: a police department quietly flips the switch on Flock Safety cameras before the people who are supposed to approve that spending, or at least know about it, ever get a vote. That's not a technicality. License plate readers log every passing car, build a searchable record of where residents go, and hand that data to a private company's network that other agencies can tap into. Skipping the city council isn't an oversight, it's a shortcut around the one moment where the public could actually object.

This pattern matters because Flock's entire business model depends on speed and low friction. Get a department to sign on, get cameras in the ground, and by the time anyone asks hard questions about cost, retention, or who else can query the system, the infrastructure is already built and normalized. Councils and residents are left playing catch-up on a system that's already collecting plates.

If you want to know whether this is already happening in your own town, check our camera map to see documented Flock locations near you, and if you find gear that was never publicly disclosed or approved, our take-action page has steps for pushing your local government to answer for it.