Is flock safety good for us? #news #ai

Our Take

Rick Souza's video poses a question that city councils rarely bother to ask out loud before signing a Flock Safety contract: is this actually good for us, or just good for the company's bottom line and the police department's budget for buzzwords? The fact that everyday creators are now making content asking this question is a sign the conversation is finally catching up to the hardware already bolted to our street signs.

We don't have the full script here, and we're not going to pretend we do, but the framing alone matters. ALPR systems get sold to city councils as a narrow tool for recovering stolen cars or finding an Amber Alert vehicle. In practice, they log the movements of every driver, law-abiding or not, and that data sits in a database that can be queried, shared across jurisdictions, and occasionally misused with real consequences for innocent people. 'Is it good for us' is the right question. The answer depends on who 'us' means, and whether the public ever got a real vote on the tradeoff.

That's the gap we try to fill. If a camera like the ones discussed in this video is already running in your town, you can check our camera map to see what's nearby, and if you want to push back on a deployment or demand transparency from your local government, our take-action page has concrete steps. Credit to Rick Souza for putting the question in front of a wider audience — now it's on the rest of us to answer it with more than a shrug.