Flock cameras used to locate Brazil man charged in 2002 Pennsylvania cold case

Our Take

A 20-year-old cold case getting a break is the kind of story Flock Safety loves to hand to local newsrooms, and WTWO WAWV TV ran with it: Terre Haute police say their Flock camera network helped Clay County investigators track down a man wanted in a Pennsylvania homicide. It's a compelling headline, and we're not disputing that solving a two-decade-old murder matters to the victim's family.

But one dramatic cold-case solve doesn't tell you what these systems are doing on the other 364 days of the year. Flock's nationwide web of plate readers logs the movements of millions of ordinary drivers who have never been suspected of anything, building a searchable travel history that police departments, and sometimes agencies far outside their jurisdiction, can query without a warrant. The cold-case win is the sales pitch; the daily, suspicionless tracking of everyone else is the business model. When the press release always leads with the rare success story, it's worth asking how many cameras it took, how long that data sat in a database, and who else had access to it along the way.

If you want to see how far this network already reaches in your own community, check our camera map, and if you'd rather not just watch it happen, our take-action page has concrete steps for pushing back at the city council level.