Don’t Fall For The Flock Hustle

Our Take

Marc Palasciano's title says it plainly: "Don't Fall For The Flock Hustle." That framing matters because Flock Safety doesn't sell itself to the public as a surveillance company — it sells itself to city councils and HOAs as a tidy software subscription that happens to photograph every car that passes by. The pitch is smooth, the brochures are glossy, and the actual conversation about who gets access to that data, for how long, and under what oversight usually happens after the cameras are already bolted to the pole.

We don't know the specifics of Palasciano's argument beyond the title, but the instinct behind it tracks with what we've seen reporting on this industry for months: communities get a sales demo, not a civil liberties briefing. Nobody's walking a city council through what happens when a federal agency, a bounty hunter, or an out-of-state investigator pulls your town's plate data for something that has nothing to do with local crime. That's the hustle — a product marketed as neighborhood safety that quietly becomes a nationwide tracking network stitched together one city contract at a time.

Watch the embedded video and judge Palasciano's case for yourself. If you want to see whether this sales pitch has already landed in your neighborhood, check our camera map, and if you're ready to push back at a city council meeting, our take-action page has the tools to get started.