Video: Auburn Police Chief Matthew Androsko on Flock Safety cameras
The short version: A police chief's friendly pitch for Flock cameras in Auburn is a reminder that these systems expand fast when nobody outside the department is asking hard questions.
Our Take
The Citizen Newspaper's sit-down with Auburn Police Chief Matthew Androsko is a familiar genre: the local chief walks a reporter through the department's Flock Safety setup, explains how convenient the stationary cameras are for solving cases, and the story runs with little pushback. That's not a knock on the outlet for covering it — it's worth covering. But "the chief says it works great" is a press release, not oversight, and it's exactly how these networks spread from a few intersections to blanket coverage without a single public vote on retention periods, data sharing, or who else gets to query the system.
What's missing from these chief-narrated segments is almost always the same: how long plate scans are stored, which outside agencies or federal partners can pull from Auburn's data, and what audit trail exists for abuse. Flock's own marketing leans hard on the crime-solving anecdotes because they're easy to tell and hard to argue with in a two-minute segment. The harder questions — mission creep, warrantless tracking of ordinary drivers, and whether a patchwork of local cameras is quietly becoming a national surveillance grid — don't fit that format.
If you live in or around Auburn, that's reason enough to look at what's actually been installed nearby. Check our camera map to see Flock coverage in your area, and if you want to push your city council for real transparency on retention and access policies, our take-action page has a starting point.
This is DeFlock The USA’s original commentary. The video above is the work of The Citizen Newspaper, published on YouTube — full credit to the creator.