Las Cruces PD demonstrates their use of Flock

Our Take

Credit to KTSM 9 News for getting Las Cruces PD on camera walking through how they use Flock's license plate readers — that kind of access is rare and worth watching. But a guided demo from the department that bought the system is never going to surface the hard questions: who else can query this data, how long is it stored, and what happens when a hit is wrong. Departments love to show the highlight reel of a stolen car recovered; they're less eager to talk about the thousands of innocent drivers logged doing nothing wrong every single day.

That's the pattern we keep seeing nationwide, and it's why even President Trump has been drawn into the Flock conversation — this isn't a niche issue anymore, it's a bipartisan flashpoint about how much surveillance infrastructure gets rolled out with zero public debate. A department demonstrating its tools isn't the same as a community consenting to them. Las Cruces residents deserve to know whether their city council actually held a real conversation about privacy safeguards, audit logs, and interagency data sharing before flipping these cameras on.

If you want to see whether Flock or other ALPR systems are already watching your own neighborhood, check our camera map, and if you'd rather not just watch this play out, our take-action page has concrete steps for pushing your local government toward real transparency.