Flock camera installer calls police: 'I'm getting followed'

Our Take

There's a rich irony in a company that built its entire business model on tracking cars in public getting spooked when a journalist points a camera back at one of its own vans. Atlanta News First's investigative team caught it on tape: a Flock installer, working on public infrastructure paid for with public money, calling police because a reporter was documenting the process. If surveillance is good enough for every driver in America, it should be good enough for the people bolting these cameras to utility poles.

This isn't just an awkward moment — it's a tell. Flock has spent years selling itself to city councils as a transparent, community-friendly tool, yet the instinct on the ground is to treat basic public accountability as a threat. That gap between the sales pitch and the reflexive defensiveness is exactly why local reporting like this matters, and why residents shouldn't just take vendor marketing at face value when these systems get proposed in their own towns.

We've said it before: if a technology can't survive a citizen holding up a phone, it has no business monitoring millions of law-abiding people every day. Check our camera map to see what's already watching your commute, and hit up our take-action page if you want to push back at the local level.