How the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) + Flock Safety Reunite Families
The short version: Flock's own video pairs NCMEC's AMBER Alert mission with its ALPR network, using child-rescue stories to sell a surveillance system with far broader uses.
Our Take
This video comes straight from Flock Safety's own channel, so take it for what it is: a polished promotional piece, not independent journalism. Pairing a beloved child-safety nonprofit with a for-profit surveillance vendor is a savvy move — nobody wants to be the person questioning technology that claims to help find missing kids. But that emotional framing is exactly why we have to look closer. AMBER Alerts make up a vanishing fraction of what these cameras actually capture and store; the other 99.9% of scans are ordinary people driving to work, church, or the pharmacy, all logged and searchable by police departments and, increasingly, federal agencies.
Credit to Trevor Chandler and Dr. Bischoff for spotlighting a genuinely important mission, but the interview conveniently skips the parts that matter to privacy-minded Americans: how long this data is retained, who else gets access to it, and what happens when the same AMBER Alert infrastructure gets repurposed for immigration sweeps, abortion-related investigations, or political dissent tracking — all things that have already happened with Flock's network in other states. 'Think of the children' has always been an effective sales pitch for expanding surveillance, and it's worth remembering that the infrastructure built today for noble reasons doesn't disappear when the noble reason does.
If you want to see how many of these cameras have already gone up in your own neighborhood, check our camera map, and if you'd rather not just watch this rollout happen, visit our take-action page for ways to push back at the local level.
This is DeFlock The USA’s original commentary. The video above is the work of Flock, published on YouTube — full credit to the creator.