#flocksafety #walkablecities #janejacobs #urbanism #sociology
The short version: The Urban Current uses Jane Jacobs' 'eyes on the street' idea to show how Flock Safety cameras invert real community safety into automated surveillance.
Our Take
Jane Jacobs built her case for safe streets on something simple: neighbors who know each other, shopkeepers who watch the sidewalk, people who have a stake in their block. The Urban Current's short makes a sharp point by putting that idea next to Flock Safety's network of license plate cameras — these are not the same thing, even though both get sold as 'public safety.' One is organic trust between people. The other is a corporation logging every car that passes, whether or not anyone asked for it.
That distinction matters because Flock and similar ALPR vendors love to borrow the language of community safety while building something closer to a permanent, searchable record of where everyone's car has been. Jacobs' 'eyes on the street' were accountable, local, and mutual. A camera on a pole reporting to a cloud database and shared with police departments and sometimes federal agencies is none of those things — it's surveillance infrastructure dressed up in urbanist branding.
Credit to The Urban Current for connecting these dots in a format people will actually watch. If you want to see how far this network has already spread in your own city, check our camera map, and if you're ready to push back on a camera going up near you, our take-action guide walks through what actually works at the city council level.
This is DeFlock The USA’s original commentary. The video above is the work of The Urban Current, published on YouTube — full credit to the creator.