Flock and Axon: The Companies That Want To Record Everything You Do

Our Take

Michael Bordenaro's video does something a lot of local coverage misses: it zooms out. Flock Safety doesn't exist in a vacuum, and neither does Axon. Put the plate readers on every street corner next to a growing fleet of body cams, drones, and AI-flagged "officer safety" alerts, and you're not looking at two separate products — you're looking at an integrated surveillance stack being sold to police departments as a subscription service, no warrant required for most of it.

That's the part that should worry people more than any single camera pole. Flock's pitch has always been "just plates, just public roads," but the business model depends on scale — thousands of cameras feeding a searchable national database, increasingly cross-referenced with footage and data from partners like Axon. Once that infrastructure exists, the question stops being whether it could be misused and becomes when, by whom, and how you'd ever find out. Departments rarely volunteer audit logs, and most residents have no idea a reader is clocking their commute twice a day.

Credit to Bordenaro for tying the corporate incentives together instead of treating this as a one-off local news story. If you want to see how close this has already gotten to your own neighborhood, check our camera map, and if you'd rather not just watch it happen, our take-action page has concrete steps for pushing back at the city council level before the contract renews itself.