Excelsior Springs to hold Flock camera town hall as residents raise concerns

Our Take

Credit to KMBC 9 for covering this one, because it's a story playing out in towns everywhere: a police department quietly installs Flock cameras, residents start noticing the cameras (and asking questions), and suddenly the department is scrambling to hold a town hall and roll out a "transparency portal." That's the pattern. Transparency portals are better than nothing, but they're also a PR move that lets departments keep the cameras while looking responsive. A dashboard showing how many times a camera was pinged tells you nothing about whether that surveillance was necessary, proportionate, or even legal in the first place.

What usually gets lost in these town halls is the basic fact that ALPR networks log the movements of every single driver who passes, regardless of suspicion. That data gets stored, shared across agencies and sometimes with ICE or out-of-state police, and can be queried with far less oversight than most residents assume. Excelsior Springs residents are right to be uneasy, and they deserve real answers about retention periods, who can access the data, and whether there's any independent audit of searches — not just a portal that logs activity after the fact.

If you're in Excelsior Springs or anywhere else wondering whether your town has these cameras, check our map to see what's been documented near you, and if you want to push back effectively, our take-action page has concrete steps for showing up to meetings like this one and asking the questions that actually matter.