Ban federal funding for Flock cameras

Our Take

When a sitting member of Congress puts out a video titled "Ban federal funding for Flock cameras," that's worth sitting up for. Rep. Ro Khanna is signaling that the money trail behind the Flock Safety buildout — grants, DOJ pass-throughs, whatever federal dollars local police departments have been using to bankroll these camera networks — deserves scrutiny and maybe a hard stop. We don't have the transcript, so we won't pretend to know his exact policy mechanism or vote count, but the headline alone tells you this issue has moved from neighborhood Facebook groups and city council meetings to the floor of Congress.

That matters because Flock's growth has largely happened below the radar of federal oversight: thousands of jurisdictions signing contracts one at a time, with little public debate about data retention, cross-agency sharing, or how a private company's AI-flagged plate database becomes a tool cops across state lines can query. Federal funding has quietly subsidized a lot of that expansion. If Congress starts asking whether taxpayer money should underwrite a nationwide, privately-run surveillance grid, that's a crack in the wall that community organizers and civil liberties advocates have been trying to open for years.

Credit to Rep. Khanna for putting this on the record — now the job is making sure constituents actually know their own towns are wired up. Check our camera map to see what's running near you, and if you want to push your own representatives the way Khanna is pushing on the federal level, our take-action page has the tools to get started.