Trois-Rivières home camera registry helps police; SPVM exploring plan

Our Take

CityNews reporter Lola Kalder's piece is a good reminder that the surveillance dragnet doesn't need a single Flock camera to grow — all it needs is a spreadsheet. A "voluntary" registry sounds harmless: you just tell police your Ring doorbell exists, and if something happens nearby, they know who to knock on. But once that list exists, it becomes a map police can query at will, no warrant required, no public vote taken on whether an entire neighborhood's front-porch footage should be treated as an extension of the police department's own camera network.

Trois-Rivières already has this running, and now Montreal's SPVM is studying it — which in bureaucratic language usually means it's already halfway adopted. The pitch is always convenience and safety, and sure, some homeowners in the piece seem happy to volunteer. But consent given today under friendly framing doesn't stay narrow forever. Once police have a registry of thousands of private cameras blanketing a city, the practical difference between that and a centrally-owned surveillance grid gets thin fast — it's just outsourced hardware and free storage.

This is exactly the kind of quiet infrastructure-building we track at DeFlock — it's not just ALPRs bolted to poles, it's every doorbell, dashcam, and driveway camera getting looped into a police-accessible system one registration form at a time. Check our map to see what's already logged in your area, and visit take action if you want to push back before your city's version of this program becomes routine.