Deflock America
The short version: A protest song by musician @pesky_peasant turns Flock Safety's ALPR sprawl into a biting anthem, putting mass surveillance into a format more people will actually sit through.
Our Take
Not every piece of ALPR criticism comes as a research report or a city council transcript — sometimes it comes as a three-minute track. "Deflock America" by @pesky_peasant, distributed through DistroKid, takes aim at the quiet spread of automated license plate readers with the kind of plainspoken anger that a lot of affected communities feel but rarely get to hear set to music. We don't have a lyric sheet or press kit to lean on here, so we'll keep our read high-level, but the title alone does real work: it names the company, names the country, and frames the cameras as something being done to us, not for us.
That framing matters because Flock Safety has largely won the messaging war by keeping its product boring — a camera on a pole, a contract with a small-town PD, a line item in a budget. Culture is one of the few places that boredom can't survive. A song gets shared, gets stuck in people's heads, gets forwarded to a neighbor who's never heard the phrase "automated license plate reader" in their life. That's a different kind of reach than a policy memo, and it's worth crediting an independent artist for using it.
If the track gets you thinking about what's bolted to the poles in your own town, don't stop at listening — check our camera map to see what's already been documented near you, and head to our take-action page if you want to push back on your local council before the next camera goes up.
This is DeFlock The USA’s original commentary. The video above is the work of @pesky_peasant - Topic, published on YouTube — full credit to the creator.