Aurora police show how Flock cameras work behind the scenes

Our Take

Give a local TV crew a badge-eye view of a "Real Time Crime Center" and you'll get exactly what FOX31's Nicole Fierro delivered: a tidy, department-guided walkthrough of how Aurora police use Flock Safety's ALPR network to track vehicles across the city. Credit to the station for getting cameras inside a room that's usually closed to the public — but access journalism like this almost always comes with a built-in filter. When the people running the surveillance system are also the ones narrating the tour, viewers get the sales pitch, not the audit.

What's missing from these segments is the stuff that actually matters to accountability: how long Aurora keeps the plate scans, who else can query that data, whether it's shared with other agencies or fed into broader networks, and what happens when the system misidentifies a car or flags an innocent driver. Flock's own marketing leans hard on solved-crime anecdotes, but a functioning real-time crime center is still a dragnet that logs the movements of everyone who drives past those cameras — not just suspects.

If Aurora has Flock cameras watching your commute, you deserve to know it, and to know what oversight — if any — exists. Check our camera map to see what's been documented near you, and if you want to push back on unchecked ALPR expansion in your city, our take-action page has concrete next steps.