Woonsocket, RI Sees Success With Flock Safety Cameras
The short version: Flock's own promotional reel touts Woonsocket, RI as a win, but a company-produced clip aired on local news isn't independent proof ALPRs make anyone safer.
Our Take
Notice the channel here: this isn't ABC6's investigative unit digging into Woonsocket's crime data — it's Flock Safety itself, packaging a friendly local news segment as proof of concept. That's not journalism, it's marketing with a news chyron slapped on top. When the surveillance vendor is also the one telling you its cameras work, you should ask who fact-checked the numbers, what the false-positive rate looks like, and whether any of this data has been shared with ICE, state fusion centers, or other agencies without Woonsocket residents' knowledge.
"Success" in these clips almost always means arrests tied to plate hits, never the cost to due process, the racial profiling risk baked into pretextual stops, or the sheer scale of data collection on people who've done nothing wrong. Every car that rolls past a Flock camera in Woonsocket gets logged, time-stamped, and stored — a permanent movement record for an entire town, sold as a crimefighting tool. That trade-off deserves scrutiny Flock's own PR department isn't going to provide.
If you live in or near Woonsocket, check our camera map to see exactly where these readers are watching, and visit our take-action page for ways to push your city council for transparency, audits, and real answers before you take a vendor's word for it.
This is DeFlock The USA’s original commentary. The video above is the work of Flock, published on YouTube — full credit to the creator.