How Flock Technology is Helping Mt. Juliet Become a Safe City
The short version: Flock's own promotional video touts Mt. Juliet, TN's expanding ALPR-PTZ-drone network, but offers marketing anecdotes, not evidence, for scaling up surveillance of every driver.
Our Take
This isn't independent reporting — it's a Flock-produced ad, and it shows. One anecdote about a single LPR hit on a wanted suspect becomes the pretext for a full "Safe City" buildout: license plate readers, pan-tilt-zoom cameras, and now a drone-as-first-responder program layered on top. Chief Chandler's line that "over 90% of the individuals who commit crime in our community... don't live in Mt. Juliet" is doing a lot of work here — it's the standard justification vendors and departments use to explain why every resident's daily movements get logged regardless of suspicion. Nobody in the video asks how many searches happened, who audits access, or how long plate data sits in Flock's cloud.
That's the pattern across these city case-study videos: a dramatic success story, a chief praising "proactive policing," and zero mention of retention policies, data-sharing with other agencies, or what happens when the system misreads a plate. Drones as first responders push the mission even further, normalizing routine aerial monitoring of neighborhoods under the banner of officer safety. Growth gets framed as inevitable progress, not a policy choice taxpayers and city councils should be scrutinizing line by line.
If you want to know whether a system like this is already watching your commute, check our camera map, and if Mt. Juliet's playbook is spreading to your town, see what you can do about it at take action.
This is DeFlock The USA’s original commentary. The video above is the work of Flock, published on YouTube — full credit to the creator.