REAL TIME CRIME CENTERS | Episode One Trailer
The short version: Flock's own promo trailer for its RTCC series shows the company marketing itself as the architect of the surveillance infrastructure it profits from.
Our Take
Note who's talking here: this isn't a journalist or an independent researcher covering Real Time Crime Centers, it's Flock Safety producing a slick in-house series to sell the concept, narrated by a former cop now drawing a Flock paycheck as "Director of RTCC Strategy." That's worth sitting with. The company that manufactures the cameras is also the company defining what "the future of policing" looks like, and unsurprisingly that future involves buying more Flock hardware and software.
RTCCs sound bureaucratic and boring, but they're the nerve centers where ALPR feeds, camera networks, drones, and other sensor data get fused into a single dashboard that officers can query in real time. Once a city builds one, it tends to keep feeding it more data streams, more retention, more integrations, because that's the sales pitch. The "eliminating crime" framing glosses over the fact that these systems track everyone's movements, not just suspects, and that oversight of how that data gets used, shared, or retained is often an afterthought bolted on after the contract is signed.
We'll be watching the rest of this series with that in mind. If you want to see whether your own community already has this infrastructure in place, check our camera map, and if you'd rather your city not build a permanent surveillance dashboard on your daily life, our take-action page has steps for pushing back at the local level.
This is DeFlock The USA’s original commentary. The video above is the work of Flock, published on YouTube — full credit to the creator.