Flock Cameras Work. How Much Surveillance Is Worth It?
The short version: Kursity asks the right question — not whether Flock cameras work, but whether the surveillance trade-off is worth it — and we think the answer is no.
Our Take
Credit to Kursity for framing this the way it should be framed. The debate was never really about whether ALPRs can help close a case here or there — of course a network of cameras photographing every car that passes will occasionally produce a lead. The real question, the one most local news segments conveniently skip, is what we give up to get that occasional lead: a permanent, searchable record of where everyone drives, parked in a private company's database, with audit trails that departments routinely fail to follow.
That "worth it" calculation almost never gets made honestly at the city council level. Flock pitches departments on solved crimes and skips the part where plate data has been used for immigration sweeps, abortion-related tracking, and personal lookups by officers with no case number attached. A camera that "works" isn't the same as a camera that's accountable, and right now most of these systems have plenty of the former and almost none of the latter.
If you want to see how deep this network already runs in your own town, check our camera map, and if you're ready to push back, our take-action page has concrete steps for your next council meeting.
This is DeFlock The USA’s original commentary. The video above is the work of Kursity, published on YouTube — full credit to the creator.