This Ain't Your Average Camera- Spotted Another Hidden Flock Camera

Our Take

Credit to R.C Entertainment for doing what most of us don't: actually looking up. This clip near Fashion Valley is a good reminder that Flock Safety's pitch of "transparent, community-driven safety" often plays out as poles and boxes camouflaged against signage, foliage, or traffic infrastructure until someone with a camera and some curiosity notices. That's not an accident — it's a deployment strategy, and it matters because consent and awareness are the first casualties of a camera network most residents never voted on or were told about.

The bigger issue isn't one hidden unit in one shopping district. It's that every plate read, whether you're a commuter, a jogger, or someone visiting a clinic or a protest, gets logged, time-stamped, and routed into a searchable database that local police and, in many cases, outside agencies can query. San Diego has become one of the more ALPR-saturated metros in the country, and creators like this one are doing the public mapping that city councils and police PR departments won't.

If you want to see how many of these systems are already running in your own neighborhood, check our camera map — and if you'd rather not just watch the surveillance state grow, our take-action page has concrete steps for pushing back at the local level.