Flock Around and Find Out: The Camera "Deflocking" Trend

Our Take

Alex R. Wagner's rundown of the "deflocking" trend captures something we've been watching build for a while: ordinary people getting fed up enough with ALPR cameras on their streets that they start pushing back, whether through protest, local organizing, or more direct action against the hardware itself. The clever name aside, what matters here is the underlying signal — communities are waking up to the fact that these cameras weren't put there through any real democratic debate, and plenty of folks want out.

We're not in the business of cheerleading vandalism, but we understand the frustration driving it. When a private company can blanket a town in networked cameras that log every car's movements, often under opaque contracts and with little public input, some people decide direct confrontation is the only lever they have left. The more productive path is knowing exactly where this infrastructure lives and organizing before it spreads, which is exactly why we built our camera map — it's the fastest way to find out if Flock has already set up shop near you.

Videos like this one matter because they normalize public skepticism of a surveillance apparatus that's grown with almost no friction for years. If you want to turn that frustration into something durable — public records requests, city council pressure, contract cancellations — check out our take action page for a roadmap that doesn't require touching a single camera.