Man convicted of manslaughter with help of license plate reader tech, flock cameras
The short version: CBS6 Albany reports a Troy manslaughter conviction leaned on Flock ALPR data, the latest case prosecutors tout as proof the cameras work.
Our Take
Credit to CBS6 Albany for covering this case, but we'd push back on the framing baked into most local news segments like this one: a single successful prosecution gets held up as the receipt for an entire surveillance network, while the thousands of scans on innocent Troy residents' vehicles that happened to make that hit possible go unmentioned. ALPR systems don't just watch the one car linked to a crime — they log every plate that passes, building a movement history on everyone, and that dragnet is the actual product Flock sells to police departments.
Convictions like this are exactly how these systems get normalized. Nobody runs a segment on the retired teacher or the person fleeing a bad relationship whose location history sat in a database for weeks before being purged, but one solved case becomes the permanent justification for keeping the cameras up indefinitely, expanding the network, and skipping the harder conversation about audits, retention limits, and who else gets access to that data down the line.
If you want to know whether these cameras have shown up near you, check our camera map, and if your town is debating a new Flock contract, our take-action page has tools for pushing back before the system is already in place.
This is DeFlock The USA’s original commentary. The video above is the work of CBS6 Albany, published on YouTube — full credit to the creator.