Germantown sees success solving crime and keeping residents safe with Flock Safety

Our Take

Notice who's doing the talking here: this isn't an independent investigation, it's Flock Safety's own YouTube channel recirculating a local news hit piece — sorry, "success story" — about its product. When the company selling the cameras is also the one curating which news segments get amplified, you should expect a highlight reel, not a balanced accounting. Fox6's segment leans on police talking points about solving crime, but viewers never hear how many plates were scanned to get those results, who else had access to the data, or how long it sat in a database before anyone asked permission.

That's the pattern across nearly every "Flock works" clip: a few anecdotes stand in for actual transparency. No mention of false-positive stops, no audit of data-sharing agreements with other agencies or federal partners, no discussion of retention periods or whether residents ever got a public vote before blanket license-plate tracking went up around their town. Germantown isn't unique — it's just the latest small city added to a map of blanket surveillance sold as safety.

If you want the real picture instead of a press release, check our camera map to see how far this network has spread near you, and visit our take action page if you think your city council should have to justify this kind of spending and data access before, not after, the cameras go up.