Let's #deflock and do this instead to make #weho streets safer

Our Take

Helen Krieger's WeHo-focused video cuts right to the core problem with Flock Safety's pitch to cities: it skips the deliberative process that actually makes traffic safety tools legitimate. Red light and speed cameras, whatever you think of them, usually go through years of public hearings, data review, and council votes. Flock's ALPR networks tend to get rubber-stamped in a single meeting, sold as a crime-fighting silver bullet with none of the privacy guardrails or public debate that should come with a system logging every car that passes a given corner.

That distinction matters because the two technologies aren't actually comparable. A red light camera photographs a specific violation at a specific intersection. Flock's cameras build a rolling, searchable record of where you drive, when, and how often — data that sits in a database well beyond the scope of any single traffic law, often shared across jurisdictions with little oversight. Krieger's framing of this as a false equivalency is worth sitting with: 'safety camera' branding shouldn't be enough to wave through a mass-surveillance system.

If you want to see whether this is already happening in your own city, check our camera map, and if WeHo's fight sounds familiar, our take-action page has tools for pushing back before Flock becomes the default answer to 'safer streets.'