Flock Safety tightens rules for police cameras
The short version: 11Alive's Jarvis Robertson reports on Flock Safety's new 'safeguards' after Georgia misuse scandals, but policy promises aren't the same as accountability.
Our Take
Credit to Jarvis Robertson and 11Alive for digging into this, because the pattern here is familiar: a surveillance company gets caught letting its network be abused, then rolls out a set of internal rules and press releases promising it won't happen again. Flock Safety writing its own homework isn't oversight — it's damage control. The company sells the cameras, profits from the data pipeline, and now wants to be trusted as the referee for how police use it.
Georgia has become a flashpoint precisely because these systems scale so fast and so quietly. Once a department has access to a nationwide network of plate reads, the question isn't just "did someone misuse it this one time" — it's "what structural incentive exists to prevent the next misuse." Self-imposed safeguards can be loosened, reworded, or quietly dropped the moment public attention moves on. Real accountability means enforceable local policy, audit logs the public can actually see, and elected officials who know exactly what they voted for when they approved a Flock contract.
If you want to know whether these cameras are already watching your street, check our camera map, and if your town is considering a contract or renewal, our take-action page has steps for pushing back before the cameras go up, not after the next scandal breaks.
This is DeFlock The USA’s original commentary. The video above is the work of 11Alive, published on YouTube — full credit to the creator.