Somerton Police Try Flock Safety License Plate Readers

Our Take

This clip, credited to Flock's own channel and aired on KYMA NBC 11 in Yuma, is less an investigation than a product demo dressed up as local news. That's typical of how these rollouts get introduced to the public: a friendly segment, a police spokesperson praising "public safety," and no mention of who else gets access to the plate data, how long it's stored, or whether Somerton residents were ever asked if they wanted a camera network logging their movements.

Small border towns like Somerton are exactly where Flock likes to start these conversations, low scrutiny, sympathetic framing, and a built-in narrative about crime and immigration enforcement that makes tough questions feel unpatriotic. But the technical reality doesn't change with the zip code: every plate scanned gets timestamped, geotagged, and potentially shared across a growing web of agencies and, in some cases, private and federal partners, with little independent auditing of how that data is used or misused.

If you want to know whether Somerton or a town near you already has these cameras up, check the map, and if you'd rather your city not become the next uncritical news segment, see what you can do at take action.