WECT INVESTIGATES: Concerns about Flock Cameras
The short version: WECT's local investigation into Flock cameras shows even mainstream news is catching on to the gap between ALPR marketing and how these systems actually get used.
Our Take
Credit to WECT News 6 for digging into local pushback on Flock Safety's camera network. When a local affiliate starts asking pointed questions about a system most city councils approved with barely a fifteen-minute presentation, that's a sign the sales pitch is wearing thin. These cameras were sold as a narrow tool for recovering stolen cars and finding violent fugitives. In practice, the data sits in a shared national network, gets queried for all kinds of reasons, and rarely comes with the kind of audit trail that lets the public verify any of it.
The pattern WECT is surfacing in North Carolina is the same one we track everywhere: a vendor controls the database, police departments get a dashboard, and residents get a camera on every road in and out of town with no real say in the matter. Concerns about mission creep, data sharing across state lines, and who else might get access to your movement history aren't hypothetical — they're baked into how this infrastructure is built and sold.
If you want to see how dense this coverage already is where you live, check our camera map, and if you'd rather not just watch this happen to your town, our take-action page has concrete steps for pushing back at the city council level.
This is DeFlock The USA’s original commentary. The video above is the work of WECT News 6, published on YouTube — full credit to the creator.