St. Pete police chief defends Flock license cameras
The short version: A St. Pete police chief's defense of Flock cameras leans on 'it solves crimes' while dodging the harder questions about who watches the watchers.
Our Take
FOX 13's Kailey Tracy gives airtime to St. Pete's police chief making the standard pitch for Flock Safety's automated license plate readers: they help solve crimes, officers love the tool, case closed. What's conspicuously missing from that framing is any real accounting of retention periods, audit logs, who outside the department can query the system, or whether St. Pete has an actual public policy governing misuse. "It helps us solve crimes" is not an answer to "who else is looking at this data and for how long."
This is the pattern we see city after city: a chief goes on local news, says the magic words "valuable investigative tool," and the segment ends there, as if that settles the civil liberties questions. It doesn't. Flock's own national network means a camera bolted to a pole in St. Petersburg can quietly feed into searches run by agencies in other states, for reasons that have nothing to do with the case that justified installing it. Residents deserve to know the guardrails, not just the sales pitch.
Credit to FOX 13 for at least putting the chief on record. Now it's on the public to ask the follow-up questions reporters skipped. Check our camera map to see what's already watching your commute, and if you want to push back on unchecked ALPR deployment in your city, start with our take-action guide.
This is DeFlock The USA’s original commentary. The video above is the work of FOX 13 Tampa Bay, published on YouTube — full credit to the creator.