Police in Commerce City can watch every corner of their city without leaving the building
The short version: Commerce City is stitching drones, ALPRs, and ShotSpotter into one control-room view — a reminder that surveillance creep rarely gets a public vote.
Our Take
Reporter Marc Sallinger's piece on Commerce City police is a tidy snapshot of what "force multiplier" actually looks like on the ground: officers watching live feeds, pulling up plate reads, and getting gunshot pings without ever walking a beat. Each tool gets sold separately — drones for "officer safety," ALPRs for "stolen cars," ShotSpotter for "faster response" — but stacked together they add up to a department that can reconstruct your movements across town without a warrant or a judge ever being asked.
That's the part city councils rarely grapple with before they sign the contract. There's no public vote on whether a town wants a persistent, networked surveillance grid; there's just a procurement meeting and a vendor demo. Commerce City isn't unique — it's the same playbook Flock Safety and friends are running nationwide, one quiet agenda item at a time.
If you want to see whether this is already happening near you, check our camera map, and if you'd rather not wait for a reporter to find out after the fact, our take-action page has steps for pushing back before the next contract gets renewed.
This is DeFlock The USA’s original commentary. The video above is the work of Marc Sallinger, published on YouTube — full credit to the creator.