Cheyenne police host community meeting on Flock safety cameras amid privacy concerns

Our Take

Credit to Your Wyoming Link for covering this: most cities never bother holding a public meeting about ALPRs at all, they just quietly sign the Flock contract and let the cameras go up. Cheyenne PD taking questions from residents is a step above the norm, but a Q&A session isn't a substitute for actual oversight. Explaining how a tool works isn't the same as justifying why your department needs a permanent, searchable record of where every driver in town has been.

These community meetings tend to follow a script: officers walk through the crime-solving wins, reassure everyone about data retention policies, and frame the network as a narrow tool for catching stolen cars and wanted suspects. What rarely gets discussed is the scale of the data being vacuumed up on completely innocent people, who's allowed to query it, how long other agencies can hold onto Cheyenne's reads once they're shared across the network, and what happens when the system is misused or breached. Policy promises are only as good as the audits that check them, and most departments don't publish those.

If you're in Cheyenne or anywhere else in Wyoming, check our camera map to see what's already watching your streets, and head to our take-action page if you want to push your city council for real transparency instead of just a reassuring presentation.