Northtowns residents push back on license plate reader cameras

Our Take

Credit to WKBW TV in Buffalo for putting a camera on what's becoming a familiar scene nationwide: a town board or council meeting where residents show up to ask why their community quietly signed up for a rolling record of everywhere they drive. The Northtowns pushback fits a pattern DeFlock has tracked for a while now — these deals get pitched as a quiet line-item for "public safety," and then residents find out after the fact that Flock's network logs every plate, every time, whether or not anyone's suspected of anything.

What makes these local fights matter is that they're often the only real check in the whole process. Flock doesn't put its rollout to a public vote, and most city councils approve these contracts with minimal scrutiny of retention windows, data-sharing agreements, or who else can query the system down the line. When residents in Western New York start asking pointed questions, they're doing the oversight job that was skipped the first time around.

If you're in the Northtowns or anywhere else in Western New York, it's worth checking whether Flock or a similar ALPR system is already running near you — our camera map tracks known deployments across the country. And if you want to push back the way these residents are, our take-action page has concrete steps for raising it with your own local officials before the contract's already signed.