Executive order puts guidelines on Flock cameras

Our Take

KSDK News out of St. Louis is reporting on an executive order that puts "guidelines" on Flock Safety cameras after a wave of misuse allegations nationwide. We'll say what we always say when a politician reaches for the word "guidelines" instead of "ban" or "audit": read the fine print. Voluntary policies and vague oversight language have a long history of giving law enforcement agencies cover to keep doing exactly what they were doing, just with a new memo in the file.

The real problem isn't that Flock cameras lack rules — it's that the rules nobody passed are being enforced by nobody. We've seen departments blow past their own retention policies, share plate data with ICE and out-of-state agencies despite promises not to, and treat the entire network as a general-purpose tracking tool rather than the narrow crime-solving instrument it's sold as. An executive order is only as good as the audit mechanism behind it, and audits require someone with subpoena power who actually wants to look.

Credit to KSDK for keeping a camera on this story as it develops — local reporting is often the only thing that forces these systems into daylight. If you want to see whether this kind of surveillance has already landed in your neighborhood, check our camera map, and if you'd rather not wait for a toothless executive order to protect you, our take-action page has concrete steps for pushing back locally.