Prescott Flock Cameras | March 26, 2024 Worksession

Our Take

Credit to Jen's Two Cents for digging up this footage, because this is exactly how mass surveillance gets normalized in America: not with a public debate about privacy rights, but buried inside a budget worksession where a police chief lists ALPRs alongside other "technology initiatives" like new radios or software licenses. When Flock cameras get presented as a line item instead of a policy decision, city councils rarely get asked the hard questions — how long is data retained, who can access it, is it shared with other agencies, what happens when the system is wrong.

This is the pattern we see over and over in city after city. A police department wants a tool, frames it purely in terms of officer efficiency and case closure rates, and elected officials nod along because objecting feels like you're soft on crime. Nobody in the room is representing the thousands of residents whose daily movements are about to be logged into a searchable database. That's the real cost of a "budget overview" — the public conversation about Fourth Amendment implications never happens because it's never on the agenda.

If you live in or near Prescott, check our camera map to see what's already been deployed in your area, and head to our take-action page if you want to push your own city council to actually debate this stuff in the open instead of nodding it through during a worksession.