FLOCK CAMERAS: “THE TIMES WE LIVE IN” — MAYOR
The short version: Margate's mayor defends Flock ALPRs as just "the times we live in," a shrug that treats mass surveillance as inevitable rather than a choice.
Our Take
Eye On Margate caught something we hear in city council chambers across the country: when pressed on Flock Safety cameras, Mayor Antonio Arserio didn't offer a policy defense — he offered a shrug. "The times we live in" is doing a lot of work in that quote. It reframes a deliberate purchasing decision, one that puts every plate scanned into a searchable, shareable database, as some unstoppable force of nature nobody can be blamed for.
That framing matters because it's exactly how these systems spread without real debate. Nobody votes for "mass surveillance." They vote for a line item at a commission meeting, get told it's just modern policing, and the cameras go up before residents even know what data is being collected or who else can access it. Margate isn't unique here — it's the standard script, and it works because most people never see the hardware or the interlocal agreements behind it.
Credit to Eye On Margate for pushing the question and putting a local official's actual words on record instead of a press release. If you want to see whether your own street already has one of these cameras, check our map, and if Margate's commission debate sounds familiar, our take-action page has steps for showing up before the vote, not after.
This is DeFlock The USA’s original commentary. The video above is the work of Eye On Margate, published on YouTube — full credit to the creator.