Flock camera and surveillance purchases to have more oversight in Kalamazoo
The short version: Kalamazoo commissioners voted 5-2 to close a loophole that let Flock camera and surveillance contracts under $100,000 skip commission review.
Our Take
Credit to WWMT-TV for flagging what should have been obvious from the start: a $100,000 threshold designed to speed up routine purchasing decisions was being used to wave through license plate readers and biometric tech with zero elected oversight. Flock's pricing just happened to land under that line, which meant Kalamazoo's Public Safety department could expand a surveillance network without a single public vote. That's not an accident, that's a loophole, and it's one plenty of other cities haven't closed yet.
What makes this vote notable isn't that Kalamazoo banned anything — it didn't. Commissioners will still likely approve these contracts. But now there's a paper trail, a public meeting, and a moment where residents can show up and ask hard questions before the cameras go live, not after. Commissioner Alonzo Wilson II put it plainly: surveillance makes people nervous, and that's a rational response, not paranoia. Oversight doesn't fix every problem with ALPR networks, but it beats discovering after the fact that your city quietly wired itself into a license-plate tracking system.
If you want to know whether your own city is doing anything close to this kind of review, start by checking our camera map to see what's already been deployed near you, then use our take-action resources to push your local council toward the same kind of accountability Kalamazoo just adopted.
This is DeFlock The USA’s original commentary. The video above is the work of WWMT-TV, published on YouTube — full credit to the creator.