One company scans American license plates 20 billion times a month.

Our Take

Alex Romano is looking at Flock Safety through an investor's lens, but the number he lands on — 20 billion license plate scans a month — is exactly the kind of figure that should stop regular people in their tracks too. That's not 20 billion cars pulled over or suspected of anything. That's 20 billion data points logged on ordinary people driving to work, church, the pharmacy, a protest, or a divorce lawyer's office, hoovered up by a private company leasing hardware to local police departments who often can't even explain how the data is stored or who else gets to see it.

The leasing model Romano highlights matters more than it sounds. Flock doesn't just sell a camera and walk away — it keeps cities on a subscription, keeps the data flowing through its own cloud, and keeps expanding the network one small-town police contract at a time. That's how you end up with a privately built, loosely regulated surveillance grid covering most of the country without a single national vote on whether Americans wanted it. The investment angle is honest about the business logic: recurring revenue from recurring surveillance.

We appreciate a creator outside the usual privacy-advocate space putting these numbers in front of a new audience — follow Alex Romano Invests for the full breakdown. If you want to see how dense this network already is where you live, check our camera map, and if you're ready to push back on a local contract, our take-action guide is the place to start.