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The Flock You Gonna Do About It? Flock Cameras, and City Councils | Man vs. Morning 72

Man vs. Morning · 2 months ago

The short version: A comedy podcast crew crashed a city council meeting to rib local officials over Flock cameras, proving ALPR pushback is going mainstream beyond typical activist circles.

Our Take

When a channel best known for jerky sponsorships and combat flip-flops starts showing up to city council meetings to grill officials about license plate readers, that tells you something about how far this issue has traveled. Man vs. Morning isn't a privacy policy outfit — they're comedians — but the fact that Flock Safety has become fodder for a general-audience show means the conversation has broken out of the usual EFF/ACLU lane and into rooms where most people actually live: local government meetings nobody normally attends.

That's exactly the dynamic we've been watching play out nationwide. City councils quietly approve Flock contracts in consent-agenda votes, assuming nobody's paying attention, and then get blindsided when residents (or in this case, a comedy crew with a mic) actually show up and ask why a private company is running a searchable database of everyone's movements with minimal oversight. Credit to the Man vs. Morning guys for turning their platform toward something with real stakes, even wrapped in their usual irreverent style — public pressure at the local level is still the most effective lever citizens have against blanket ALPR deployment.

If this video makes you wonder whether your own city has quietly wired up Flock cameras on your commute, check our map to see what's already been reported near you, and head to take action for concrete steps on how to show up at your own council meeting before the vote, not after.

This is DeFlock The USA’s original commentary. The video above is the work of Man vs. Morning, published on YouTube — full credit to the creator.