Dallas Has 684 Flock Cameras—Who Approved This?

Our Take

Credit to Moses Kaine for doing the unglamorous work of counting cameras. Six hundred eighty-four Flock units in one city isn't a pilot program or a modest homicide-solving tool — it's a dragnet, and the fact that most Dallas residents couldn't tell you when or how that dragnet got approved is exactly the problem. These systems tend to expand through a series of small, low-visibility votes: a city council line item here, a police department procurement contract there, rarely with a real public debate about what it means to have your daily movements logged by a private company's cameras on every arterial road.

Police departments love to lead with the homicide case that got solved. What they don't lead with is the retention policy, the list of agencies that can query the data, or how often the system is wrong. Dallas isn't unique — it's just further along than most. Every city that reaches this scale started with a handful of cameras and a promise that it would only be used for the worst crimes. That promise rarely survives contact with 684 cameras and a searchable database.

If you're in Dallas or anywhere else wondering how many of these things are watching your commute, check our camera map and see for yourself — then use our take-action resources to push your own city council for the transparency Dallas never got.