Spokane Valley PD Catches Suspect in 30 Minutes with Flock LPR
The short version: Flock's own promo video touts a 30-minute hit-and-run arrest, but a vendor's highlight reel isn't an audit of the dragnet surveilling everyone else.
Our Take
This clip comes straight from Flock Safety's corporate channel, so credit where it's due: it's a slick advertisement, not journalism. A fatal hit-and-run is exactly the kind of case departments love to showcase, because nobody's going to argue that catching a hit-and-run driver is bad. But a single win like this tells us nothing about the thousands of scans happening every day on people who aren't suspects in anything — commuters, churchgoers, people visiting a clinic or a lawyer's office — all captured, tagged, and stored because the same network that found one suspect vehicle also logs everyone else's.
That's the trick with these vendor-produced success stories: they're real, but they're survivorship bias. Flock doesn't release a video titled 'our camera misread a plate and police stopped the wrong car at gunpoint,' even though that's happened in departments running this same tech. The 30-minute turnaround sounds impressive until you ask how many other departments running the identical system have had no crime to solve that week and are just sitting on a growing database of everyone's movements, available to be queried, shared, or breached.
We're not saying ALPRs never help close cases. We're saying one anecdote from the company selling the cameras isn't evidence of a trade-off worth making for your town. Check the map to see what's already watching your neighborhood, and head to take action if you want a say in whether your city council signs the next contract without asking hard questions first.
This is DeFlock The USA’s original commentary. The video above is the work of Flock, published on YouTube — full credit to the creator.