Flock cameras in Valley Mills
The short version: KXXV's local report on Flock cameras arriving in tiny Valley Mills shows how ALPR surveillance keeps spreading into small-town America with little public debate.
Our Take
Credit to 25 News KXXV for pointing a camera at the cameras. Valley Mills is a small Texas town, and small towns are exactly where Flock Safety's sales pitch works best: a handful of council members, a promise of catching car thieves, and suddenly every plate entering or leaving town is logged, timestamped, and shipped to a searchable database that outlasts whoever approved it.
What's missing from most of these local segments — and this one is no exception given how thin the reporting appears — is any real accounting of who else gets access to that data. Flock's network isn't a local tool; it's a node in a nationwide system that other agencies, and sometimes federal ones, can query. A town of a few hundred people doesn't need a dragnet that tracks every vehicle movement 24/7, and residents rarely get asked whether they want one before it's installed.
If Valley Mills has cameras now, they're on our map, and if you want to know what's watching your own commute, check the map. If you'd rather do something about it than just read about it, our take-action page has concrete steps for pushing back at the local level.
This is DeFlock The USA’s original commentary. The video above is the work of 25 News KXXV, published on YouTube — full credit to the creator.