Flock cameras in Pittsburg

Our Take

KOAM News Now's segment on Pittsburg gives us the familiar script: local police announce a new tool to fight crime, cameras go up, and the public is left to find out the details after the fact. We appreciate KOAM putting a camera on this story, because most of these rollouts happen with a press release and a ribbon-cutting, not a real conversation about what it means to have every passing car logged, time-stamped, and stored in a database that can be queried by agencies well outside Pittsburg city limits.

That's the pattern we track nationwide: a city council approves a handful of license plate readers for "violent crime" or "stolen vehicles," and within a year the data is being shared across dozens of jurisdictions through Flock's network, often with no local oversight of who's pulling records or why. Small towns like Pittsburg rarely have the staff or appetite to audit that access, which means the system runs largely on trust — not transparency.

If you're in the Pittsburg area, check our camera map to see what's been deployed near you, and if you want to push back on secret-by-default surveillance in your community, our take-action page has steps for getting real answers from your local government before the cameras become permanent fixtures nobody remembers approving.