The number of agencies with access to police Flock camera data in Minnesota ranges widely

Our Take

Credit to KSTP 5 Eyewitness News for digging into a question Flock Safety and its police customers would rather nobody ask out loud: once a department flips on data sharing, who actually gets to search it? The answer in Minnesota, apparently, is "it depends entirely on which town you happen to drive through." One agency shares with zero outside departments, another with hundreds. That's not a policy, that's a shrug.

This is the structural problem with Flock's network model in a nutshell. Every department sets its own sharing rules, there's no statewide standard, and the default settings tend to favor maximum sharing unless someone in city hall specifically pushes back. So a resident's movements captured by a hometown camera can end up searchable by agencies hundreds of miles away, with no public vote and often no meaningful audit of who searched what and why. "Local control" becomes a fiction when the data doesn't respect city limits.

If you live in Minnesota, this is worth calling your city council about — ask them not just whether Flock cameras exist, but exactly which agencies can query the footage and how often those searches are logged and reviewed. Check our camera map to see what's already been documented near you, and use our take-action guide to push for real sharing limits before the network grows any wider.