Minnesota city ditching license plate reading Flock cameras after community outcry
The short version: Columbia Heights leaders sided with residents over police brass, pulling the plug on Flock ALPRs — proof local pushback can actually win.
Our Take
Credit where it's due: FOX 9's Corin Hoggard captured something we don't see nearly often enough — elected officials choosing to listen to residents over the wishes of their own police department. Columbia Heights isn't a big city, but its decision to walk away from Flock Safety's license plate readers is a reminder that these deployments are not inevitable. They're policy choices, made by people who answer to voters, and voters can push back.
The usual script goes the other way: a chief pitches Flock as a force multiplier for solving crimes, a council rubber-stamps it in a single meeting, and cameras go up before most residents know it happened. What's different here is that community outcry actually got in front of the rollout and changed the outcome. That's the leverage point civil liberties advocates keep pointing to — these systems run on continuous, warrantless tracking of everyone's movements, not just suspects, and once the cameras are up, reversing course gets a lot harder.
If you want to know whether your own city already has this infrastructure watching your commute, check our camera map, and if you'd rather your council have the same debate Columbia Heights just had, our take-action page has the tools to start it.
This is DeFlock The USA’s original commentary. The video above is the work of FOX 9 Minneapolis-St. Paul, published on YouTube — full credit to the creator.