The cameras tracking your every move.

Our Take

Nolan Southerland did the math that most city councils never bother to run: Burbank's 57 Flock cameras are scanning roughly 1.5 million vehicles every month, and only about half of one percent of those scans ever produce a hot list hit. That means the overwhelming majority of drivers swept into this dragnet are just ordinary people going to work, picking up kids, or driving to church — with zero suspicion of wrongdoing, yet fully logged, timestamped, and geotagged in a police database anyway.

The video also flags something we've hammered on repeatedly: the OCR tech turning plate images into searchable text is far from reliable. That's not a minor glitch — misreads mean innocent people get flagged as matches to be-on-the-lookout vehicles, sometimes at gunpoint during a traffic stop. A 30-day retention window sounds modest until you realize it's 30 days of everywhere you drove, available to any officer with database access and no warrant required.

Burbank is one small dot on a much bigger map of ALPR expansion happening in cities across the country with little public debate. Credit to Southerland for pulling the actual numbers instead of taking a vendor's pitch at face value. If you want to see whether your own neighborhood is wired up the same way, check our camera map, and if you're ready to push back at a city council meeting, our take-action page has what you need to get started.