Judge orders MA State Police to release records on Flock camera use

Our Take

Credit to NBC10 Boston for covering this ruling, because it cuts right to the core problem with Flock Safety's network: agencies love to deploy these cameras quietly and fight like hell to keep the details from the public. A judge just told Massachusetts State Police that 'trust us' isn't good enough — residents have a right to know where these cameras are and how the data gets used.

This matters far beyond Massachusetts. Flock's pitch to police departments has always leaned on opacity: minimal public input before installation, vague answers about retention and sharing, and reluctance to hand over logs showing who searched what and why. When courts force disclosure, it exposes the gap between what agencies claim ('just for stolen cars') and what the system actually enables — interstate data sharing, broad lookups, and tracking of ordinary people's movements with zero individualized suspicion.

Every jurisdiction should be facing this same scrutiny, not just the ones that get sued. If you want to see where these cameras are already watching near you, check our camera map, and if you want to push your own local government toward the kind of transparency this judge just ordered, start with our take-action resources.