Chief Guadnola on Expanding Technology to Keep Commerce City Safe
The short version: Commerce City PD's own promo video touts expanding drones, gunshot detection, and camera tech as a public-safety win, glossing over the surveillance tradeoffs.
Our Take
This one comes straight from the source: the Commerce City Police Department's own channel, framing Chief Guadnola's tech rollout as an unambiguous public safety upgrade. Drones as first responders, expanded gunshot detection, and presumably more networked cameras all get the standard department PR treatment — reassuring, procedural, and light on specifics about data retention, oversight, or who else gets access to what's collected.
That's the pattern we see again and again with these department-produced videos: the tech is announced as a bundle of "safety" tools, but ALPR-style camera networks and detection systems don't just watch for the threats named in the press release. Once the infrastructure is in place, it's available for whatever purpose an agency — or a partner agency, or a federal one — decides to use it for later. Commerce City residents are being told what the cameras and drones will do; they're rarely told how long the data lives or who can query it.
If you're in the Denver metro and want to know whether Commerce City already has Flock or similar ALPR cameras nearby, check our camera map. And if you want to push back on this kind of expansion before it's rubber-stamped at a council meeting, our take-action page has tools for that too.
This is DeFlock The USA’s original commentary. The video above is the work of The Commerce City Police Department, published on YouTube — full credit to the creator.