Introducing Safe Cities
The short version: Flock's own promo video pitches 'Safe Cities' — ALPR, drones, and gunshot detection bundled at a flat per-resident price — as a one-stop surveillance upgrade for police departments.
Our Take
This one comes straight from Flock itself, unveiled at the IACP trade show, and the pitch is telling: forget piecemeal camera deployments, buy the whole surveillance stack — license plate readers, drones, gunshot detection — for "as low as $1" per resident. Pricing people like a subscription tier should bother you. You are not a customer in this transaction; you're the product being counted, and your city council is the one swiping the card on your behalf, often with little public debate before the contract is signed.
Bundling matters because it changes the politics of adoption. A single ALPR proposal might get scrutinized at a council meeting. A bundled "Safe Cities" package marketed as a turnkey public-safety upgrade is designed to slide through procurement with less friction, stacking multiple surveillance modalities — read: more data streams on you, cross-referenced — into one line item. That's the business model: make total surveillance the default, easy option rather than something each tool has to justify on its own.
If your town is weighing one of these all-in-one deals, that's exactly when residents need to show up and ask hard questions before the vendor demo becomes a signed contract. Check our camera map to see what's already deployed near you, and use our take-action guide to push back before 'Safe Cities' becomes just another word for 'watched cities.'
This is DeFlock The USA’s original commentary. The video above is the work of Flock, published on YouTube — full credit to the creator.