Flagstaff cancels controversial contract for Flock Safety cameras
The short version: Flagstaff's city council unanimously killed its Flock Safety contract after months of public pushback, proving organized privacy advocates can actually win.
Our Take
Credit to Arizona's Family (3TV/CBS 5) for putting a number on what a lot of Flagstaff residents already suspected: more than 30 Flock cameras had quietly gone up around a city of roughly 76,000 people, feeding a private company's nationwide database with every plate that passed by. A unanimous council vote to cancel is a rare and welcome reversal, and it didn't happen because the technology suddenly changed — it happened because residents kept showing up and asking hard questions for months.
Flock's pitch is always the same: find the missing kid, catch the violent felon. Nobody disputes that ALPRs can occasionally do that. What gets glossed over is that the same network logs the commute of every law-abiding driver, every day, indefinitely, with almost no transparency about who else can query that data or for what reason. "Inconspicuous when you're just driving by" is exactly the problem — mass surveillance works precisely because it's invisible until someone finally counts the cameras.
Flagstaff shows that city councils will reverse course when constituents push hard enough. If you want to see how many of these cameras are already logging plates in your own town, check our map, and if you'd rather not wait for a scandal to force a vote, our take-action page has the tools to start that fight now.
This is DeFlock The USA’s original commentary. The video above is the work of Arizona’s Family (3TV / CBS 5), published on YouTube — full credit to the creator.