state senator seeks to outlaw Flock cameras in Virginia

Our Take

Credit to WFXR News for covering a story that deserves way more attention than it's getting: a Virginia state senator is moving to outlaw Flock Safety cameras outright. That's a notable escalation from the usual pattern of cities quietly signing multi-year contracts and hoping nobody notices the cameras popping up on utility poles. When a sitting legislator decides the whole system needs to go rather than be "regulated," it signals that the backlash to ALPR sprawl has moved from local Facebook groups into actual statehouses.

The quote from criminologist and former police officer Tod Burke cuts right to the core problem: these systems get switched on before anyone asks the public what they think. Flock's sales pitch to city councils almost always skips the community input step entirely, treating mass license plate tracking as a routine procurement decision rather than a surveillance expansion that follows every driver's movements and gets shared across agency lines, state borders, and sometimes with federal immigration enforcement. "Advantages and disadvantages" shouldn't be an afterthought weighed by a vendor's sales team — it should be the whole debate, held in public, before a single camera goes up.

Virginia residents who want to know what's already watching them can check our camera map to see documented Flock locations near home, and anyone who wants to push back on a system installed without their consent can find concrete steps at take action. One senator's bill won't dismantle the network by itself, but it's proof that the "nothing to hide" line is losing ground once people actually see how this technology works.