Provo City Police address concerns over AI license plate reader cameras

Our Take

Credit to ABC4 Utah for capturing what's becoming a familiar script: a city quietly rolls out Flock Safety cameras, residents find out and start asking hard questions, and police show up to a council meeting with the standard reassurances about "real-time alerts" and catching "potential suspects." The problem is that these reassurances rarely come with binding policy, independent audits, or hard limits on data sharing — just a promise to trust the department.

Provo isn't unique. Flock's pitch to city councils across the country follows the same pattern: frame the network as a narrow tool for finding stolen cars or wanted plates, then quietly expand what the system can query, who can access it, and how long the data sits in a database. Once hundreds of cameras are logging every plate that passes, the leap from "finding a suspect" to "tracking anyone, anywhere, anytime" isn't hypothetical — it's just a search query away. Residents pushing back at that council meeting aren't being paranoid; they're doing exactly what oversight is supposed to look like before infrastructure like this becomes permanent.

If you live in or near Provo, check our camera map to see what's already watching your streets, and visit our take-action page for tools to push your own city council toward real transparency and accountability before the cameras multiply.