Don’t Flock me Friday!

Our Take

Credit to the Daytona Beach Lawyer channel for doing the boring, necessary work of actually checking receipts. If Flock Safety cameras are truly about protecting the public, you'd expect to find them clustered around the places where the public actually gathers — city hall, libraries, rec centers, ball fields. Instead, this creator walked the Port Orange municipal complex and came up empty. That's not a minor gotcha; it's a direct challenge to the marketing pitch cities get sold before they sign a Flock contract.

This matters because the "public safety" framing is doing a lot of work to justify a surveillance network that quietly logs every car that passes a camera, regardless of suspicion. When the cameras aren't actually placed to protect the spaces where families and public officials congregate, it raises an obvious question: what are they really optimized for? Traffic chokepoints that maximize data collection look a lot different on a map than cameras meant to deter crime at a rec center. Port Orange is one of the holdouts still running its program after other Florida cities walked away, which makes this kind of ground-truth check even more valuable.

We'd encourage readers to do the same thing in their own towns — go look, count, and compare locations against the stated justification. Check our camera map to see what's already been documented near you, and if you want to push back on a local program, our take-action page has concrete steps for raising this at a city council meeting.