WATCH: Man Dressed As DARTH VADER Speaks In Support Of Flock Cameras

Our Take

Credit to TYT Investigates for catching this one on camera: a man in full Darth Vader regalia stepping up to the podium to praise Flock Safety's ALPR network. It's a clip built for virality, and we get why it's spreading. But strip away the costume and what you're left with is a familiar, less funny pattern — a handful of public commenters, often with no technical or legal background, effectively deciding whether a city adopts a surveillance system that logs every car that passes a camera, indefinitely searchable by police departments across the country.

That's the real story buried under the lightsaber jokes. Flock's pitch to city councils is almost always the same: crime is scary, this technology is painless, and look how many departments already use it. What rarely gets debated in these meetings is data retention policy, who else can query the network, how breaches get handled, or whether any of this has been shown to reduce crime versus just redistributing surveillance onto everyone equally. A costume grabs headlines; the actual contract language doesn't.

We'd rather see city councils grappling with those questions than entertaining novelty acts, Sith or otherwise. If you want to know whether your own intersection has already been wired into this network, check our camera map, and if your city is about to vote on a Flock contract, our take-action page has tools for showing up with something sharper than a costume.