Communities across Washington are prioritizing public safety
The short version: Flock's own promo video about Washington touts 'safety partnerships' without mentioning audits, oversight, or how many plate reads are logged and shared statewide.
Our Take
This one's straight from Flock Safety's marketing department, not an independent reporter, so treat it accordingly. Notice what's missing: no numbers on how many cameras are actually installed across Washington, no mention of retention periods, no discussion of who else can query that data (other agencies, federal partners, insurance-adjacent companies), and nothing about the public records fights and city council pushback that have happened in plenty of Washington towns before these contracts got signed. "Prioritizing public safety" is doing a lot of work in that headline while the actual mechanics of mass license-plate tracking go unexamined.
Flock produces a lot of this kind of content precisely because it's easier to shape public opinion with warm, vague language about community partnership than to defend the specifics of a surveillance network that scans and stores the movements of everyone driving through town, innocent or not. If your city or county is considering — or already running — one of these systems, the video gives you zero information about opt-out mechanisms, audit logs, or whether local police have to get a warrant before searching historical location data.
Check our camera map to see what's already deployed near you in Washington and beyond, and if your community hasn't had a real public debate about this yet, our take-action page has the tools to start one.
This is DeFlock The USA’s original commentary. The video above is the work of Flock, published on YouTube — full credit to the creator.