Telluride Local News August 20, 2026

Our Take

Telluride Local News Network deserves credit for doing what so many bigger outlets skip: sitting down with Chief Marshal Josh Comte and town officials to ask plain questions about why a resort town of a few thousand people needs automated license plate readers watching every car that comes and goes. That's exactly the kind of local accountability reporting this fight needs — surveillance decisions get made in city council chambers, not in Washington, and local reporters are often the only ones in the room.

What's notable here isn't the specifics of Telluride's deployment, which the segment doesn't fully spell out, but the pattern it represents. Flock Safety has spent years marketing itself to exactly these kinds of communities: small police departments with limited staff, tourist traffic to track, and town councils that may not have the resources to vet vendor claims about data retention, sharing agreements, or mission creep. A single-road mountain town is a strange place for a dragnet, and that's worth asking the chief directly whether cameras installed for one stated purpose stay limited to it, or who else gets access to the data down the line.

If you're in Telluride or anywhere else wondering whether your town has quietly joined the network, check our camera map to see what's already been documented nearby, and visit our take-action page for ways to push back before a handful of cameras becomes a permanent surveillance grid nobody voted on.