Did you know New Brunswick has Flock cameras that can help investigate crimes?
The short version: EricksonPOV's local look at New Brunswick's Flock cameras repeats the standard 'solves crimes' pitch without asking who else gets tracked in the process.
Our Take
Credit to EricksonPOV for putting a spotlight on New Brunswick's Flock Safety system — most residents have no idea these cameras exist until a local YouTuber or reporter points a lens at them. But the framing here is the same one Flock's marketing team hands out to every police department: cameras help solve robberies and hit-and-runs, full stop. What's missing is the other half of the story — that every plate on every car passing through town, innocent or not, gets logged, timestamped, and stored in a searchable database that officers can query for reasons having nothing to do with the crime being investigated.
"No witnesses" cases are the go-to justification for ALPR rollouts nationwide, and it's a real problem for police. But solving it with a blanket surveillance net that captures the movements of every driver, indefinitely, without a warrant, isn't the only option — it's just the cheapest one for a department to sell to a city council. New Brunswick residents deserve to know how long that data is kept, who else can access it, and whether it's shared with other agencies before they're told it's just for catching bad guys.
If you're in New Jersey and want to know whether your commute is already being logged, check our camera map for known Flock locations near you, and see our take-action page for how to push back at the local level.
This is DeFlock The USA’s original commentary. The video above is the work of EricksonPOV, published on YouTube — full credit to the creator.