The Company Quietly Replacing Flock Cameras Is So Much Worse...
The short version: Coop's video warns that whatever vendor quietly replaces Flock's ALPR cameras may offer even less transparency and accountability than Flock itself.
Our Take
Credit to Coop for digging into a trend we've been watching too: when a Flock contract gets canceled or a city 'switches providers,' the cameras don't disappear — they just get rebadged. The surveillance infrastructure stays bolted to the same poles, feeding the same kind of data into new hands, often with even less public scrutiny than Flock's already-thin transparency portals provide.
This matters because the fight against mass ALPR surveillance can't just be about one company's name on the box. If a competitor steps in with weaker audit logs, no public-facing search tools, or looser data-sharing agreements, swapping vendors can actually be a downgrade for civil liberties even while headlines frame it as 'holding Flock accountable.' The lesson from Coop's reporting is that local officials will quietly shop around for whichever vendor causes the least political friction, not necessarily the one with the most oversight.
That's exactly why mapping every camera, regardless of brand, matters more than tracking any single company's PR problems. Check our camera map to see what's actually deployed near you, and if your city is considering a vendor switch, use our take-action resources to demand public hearings and real transparency before new cameras go up.
This is DeFlock The USA’s original commentary. The video above is the work of Coop, published on YouTube — full credit to the creator.