Drone, license plate reader help track I-70 road rage suspects
The short version: 9NEWS frames drones and license plate readers as crime-solving heroes in a Wheat Ridge road rage case, glossing over the surveillance dragnet behind the headline.
Our Take
Credit to 9NEWS for showing the hardware in action, but local news segments like this one tend to tell only half the story. Yes, a road rage suspect getting tracked down sounds like a win. What rarely gets mentioned is that the same network of cameras and drones used to catch one suspect is logging the location of every single driver who passes through that corridor, guilty of nothing at all. That's the trade-off Flock Safety and its law enforcement partners rarely spell out on camera.
Police departments love leading with the rare dramatic case because it's an easy sell for public buy-in. What they don't show you is the policy debate over how long that plate data sits in a database, who else gets access to it, and whether a drone that helped find a road rage suspect today could just as easily be repurposed to track a protester, an ex-partner, or a journalist tomorrow. Wheat Ridge isn't unique — this is the same playbook rolled out in towns across the country, and each new 'success story' is used to justify expanding the system further with little public scrutiny.
If you want to see how far this has spread beyond Colorado, check our camera map to find ALPR and drone infrastructure near you, and visit our take-action page if you want to push back on unchecked surveillance expansion in your own community.
This is DeFlock The USA’s original commentary. The video above is the work of 9NEWS, published on YouTube — full credit to the creator.