Rexburg, Idaho’s City Council meeting on Flock Safety - here’s what I told the mayor and council…
The short version: A resident's public-comment pushback against Flock Safety in Rexburg, Idaho shows that local council meetings are where ALPR fights are actually won or lost.
Our Take
Credit to Taylor Riley and The Minutemen Report for documenting this: a regular resident standing up at a Rexburg, Idaho city council meeting and asking the questions elected officials rarely ask themselves before signing a Flock Safety contract. That's the unglamorous, essential work of pushing back on mass surveillance — not viral outrage, but showing up to a podium in a small town and making the case on the record.
The "nothing to hide" line gets repeated at every one of these meetings like a script, and it's worth hammering on why it fails here specifically. ALPR networks don't just watch people committing crimes — they log everyone, guilty or not, creating a permanent movement history that can be wrong, subpoenaed, misused, or hacked. Riley's point about AI misreads leading to wrongful detentions isn't hypothetical scaremongering; it's the documented failure mode of automated plate-reading systems that flag a car as stolen or wanted based on a bad match, and officers treat that alert as probable cause before anyone checks the facts. That's guilty-until-proven-innocent dressed up as public safety software.
This is exactly why local council meetings matter so much in the fight against Flock — these systems get approved quietly, line by line in budget consent agendas, unless someone in the room asks the hard questions. If Rexburg has cameras going in, or you suspect your own town does, check our map to see what's already been deployed near you, and use our take-action resources 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 The Minutemen Report, published on YouTube — full credit to the creator.