Surveillance changes vendors and keeps rolling
The short version: AI Safety Watch flags a 404 Media report showing cities dumping Flock only to plug in Axon ALPRs, proving the surveillance infrastructure itself is the real target.
Our Take
Credit to AI Safety Watch for catching what a lot of local news coverage glosses over: when a city council votes to "cancel Flock," that's often just a procurement decision, not a privacy win. As the 404 Media reporting cited in this video makes clear, the cameras stay bolted to the poles, the plate-scanning keeps running, and the data still flows into a searchable database — the only thing that changed is which company invoices the police department. Axon, Motorola, Rekor, and others are all happy to slide into a vacated contract.
This is exactly why we keep telling readers to stop treating "Flock" as the enemy and start treating ALPR networks as the enemy. The brand on the camera housing is irrelevant if the underlying capability — tracking every vehicle's movements, sharing hits across agencies and states, retaining plate data for months — survives the swap. Vendor churn can even work in the industry's favor: it resets public attention, buries the paper trail across multiple companies' privacy policies, and gives elected officials a talking point ("we addressed the concerns") without actually reducing surveillance.
If your city is debating a contract change, don't let "we're switching vendors" pass for reform. Push for hard limits: data retention caps, audit logs, bans on sharing with ICE or out-of-state agencies, and public reporting — regardless of who owns the hardware. Check our camera map to see what's already deployed near you, and use our take-action page to push your council toward real accountability instead of a rebrand.
This is DeFlock The USA’s original commentary. The video above is the work of AI Safety Watch, published on YouTube — full credit to the creator.