Three years in, the Faribault Police Department says flock cameras have been worth the investment

Our Take

KEYC News Now gives Faribault Police Department a friendly platform to declare its own surveillance program a success — three years in, no outside audit, no data on false positives, no discussion of who else can access these plate scans once they're uploaded to Flock's network. That's not journalism, that's a press release with b-roll. When the only source quoted about whether a surveillance tool "works" is the department that bought it, readers deserve to be skeptical.

"Worth the investment" is doing a lot of work in that headline. Worth it compared to what? Departments rarely publish the actual clearance-rate math, the number of unrelated people swept up in searches, or how long footage sits in a database before some other agency queries it through Flock's national lookup network. Three years of quiet local acceptance isn't proof of effectiveness — it's often just proof that nobody's been asking hard questions yet.

This is exactly the pattern we track: a small city adopts ALPRs with little public debate, and the technology becomes permanent infrastructure before residents even know it exists. Check our camera map to see if Flock has already rolled into your town, and visit take action if you want to push your local council for real transparency instead of anniversary press hits.