Norfolk PD Report Lowest Number of Homicides in 40 Years With The Help of Flock Technology
The short version: Flock's own promotional video credits 175 ALPRs and 3,000+ cameras for Norfolk's 40-year homicide low, but correlation isn't evidence and the source is the vendor itself.
Our Take
This clip comes straight from Flock Safety's marketing channel, not an independent audit, and that matters. A company touting its own product's success with a single city's crime stats — without controlling for staffing changes, economic shifts, or the dozens of other variables that move homicide numbers year to year — is advertising, not analysis. Norfolk PD may well be pleased with the system, but "lowest in 40 years" is a headline, not a causal study.
The bigger story buried under the good-news framing is scale: 175 cameras plus access to 3,000+ integrated streams means Norfolk has built one of the denser ALPR-and-camera networks in the country, feeding a private company's database with the movements of everyone who drives through town, guilty or not. That infrastructure doesn't disappear if crime goes up again next year — it just sits there, logging plates, indefinitely available to whichever agencies get access next.
Before any city treats this as a model, residents deserve the actual numbers, independent of the vendor's press team, and a real conversation about retention, access logs, and who else is quietly plugged into that network. Check our camera map to see what's already watching your own neighborhood, and visit take action if you want to push back.
This is DeFlock The USA’s original commentary. The video above is the work of Flock, published on YouTube — full credit to the creator.