Video: Cuddy on Auburn's Flock Safety license plate readers
The short version: An Auburn city councilor wants to put guardrails on Flock Safety ALPRs — a small-town story that reflects a much bigger national reckoning.
Our Take
Credit to The Citizen Newspaper for covering this at the local level, where it actually matters. Terry Cuddy is doing what elected officials are supposed to do: asking questions before rubber-stamping a surveillance contract. A resolution isn't a ban, and it isn't a policy — but it's the first crack in the door that lets residents actually see how their city is using a network of cameras that logs every car that passes by, whether or not anyone's suspected of anything.
This is the pattern we see over and over: Flock gets installed quietly, often sold to a council as a narrow tool for solving specific crimes, and only later do people realize the data is pooled, shared across jurisdictions, and searchable well beyond the original justification. Auburn wouldn't be the first town to discover that 'a few cameras for public safety' has quietly become a de facto tracking system with almost no local oversight once the contract is signed.
If you're in Auburn or anywhere else wondering whether your city already has these cameras up, check our map to see what's nearby. And if you want to push your own council toward the kind of transparency Cuddy is proposing, our take-action page has concrete steps for getting it on the agenda.
This is DeFlock The USA’s original commentary. The video above is the work of The Citizen Newspaper, published on YouTube — full credit to the creator.