Milford and South Windsor residents voice concerns surrounding Flock cameras

Our Take

Credit to WTNH News8 for actually putting a camera in front of residents who are uneasy about Flock Safety's ALPR network creeping into their towns. This is the pattern we see over and over: a police department or town council quietly approves a contract, cameras go up on utility poles, and only afterward do regular people start asking who's watching the data, how long it's kept, and who else gets access to it. Milford and South Windsor are just the latest Connecticut towns to have that conversation after the fact instead of before.

What makes these local pushback stories matter is that they puncture the sales pitch. Flock markets itself as a quiet, automatic crime-fighting tool, but the moment residents learn their daily movements are being logged — every trip to the pharmacy, the church, the ex's house — the "it's just for solving crimes" framing starts to crack. Vendor-controlled databases, vague retention policies, and the potential for data sharing across state lines are exactly the kind of mass-surveillance infrastructure that should require real public debate, not a rubber stamp at a council meeting.

If you're in Connecticut or anywhere else and didn't know cameras were already watching your street, check our map to see what's nearby, and if you want to push back the way these residents are doing, our take-action page has steps for getting it in front of your own local officials.