Video: Auburn Police Chief Matthew Androsko on Flock Safety license plate readers
The short version: Auburn's police chief touted Flock ALPRs to the city council, but a glowing annual report isn't the same as public oversight or proof it reduces crime.
Our Take
When a police chief delivers his annual report straight to the city council, the audience is friendly and the questions are softball. The Citizen Newspaper's footage of Chief Matthew Androsko pitching Flock Safety's license plate readers in Auburn follows a script we've seen in hundreds of towns: cite a few solved cases, skip the part about how many plates get scanned, stored, and shared with agencies far outside city limits.
What's missing from these annual check-ins is almost always the same thing: hard numbers on how many searches were run, who accessed the data, whether it was shared with ICE or out-of-state investigators, and what happens to the 99.9% of scans that belong to people who committed no crime. 'It helped solve a case' is not an audit. Residents deserve retention policies, audit logs, and a real public vote before cameras go up, not a recap after the fact.
Auburn is just one more dot on a fast-growing national grid of license plate surveillance. Check our camera map to see what's already watching your streets, and visit take-action for tools to push your own council toward transparency before the next 'annual report' becomes a rubber stamp.
This is DeFlock The USA’s original commentary. The video above is the work of The Citizen Newspaper, published on YouTube — full credit to the creator.