New Bedford City Council advances Flock camera oversight ordinance

Our Take

Credit to WPRI 12 News for tracking this one closely — a city council committee in New Bedford just advanced a seven-page ordinance that would force any future expansion of automatic license plate readers through public scrutiny and a council vote. That's not nothing. Most cities roll out Flock cameras through a quiet vendor contract and a police department press release, with zero debate and zero guardrails. New Bedford is flipping that script before the cameras even go up.

This is the blueprint other towns should be stealing. Oversight ordinances like this one don't ban ALPRs outright, but they do something almost as important: they put a public paper trail and an elected body between a surveillance vendor's sales pitch and your license plate data. Once that data's flowing to a third-party cloud and shared across a nationwide network, you can't unring that bell. Requiring approval up front is the only point of leverage residents actually have.

If you're in a city still debating whether to let Flock in, or wondering if your own council already quietly approved it, check our map to see what's already deployed near you, and use our take-action page to push for the same kind of public process New Bedford is fighting for now.