There Are Policies. There's Oversight. | 116,017 Flock searches, one Michigan city

Our Take

This is the kind of grinding, unglamorous work that actually tests the promises Flock Safety and local police departments make in public meetings. Magnetic Norse didn't settle for the talking point that "there are policies, there's oversight" — they filed a Michigan FOIA request, got denied, appealed, and came back with six months of hard numbers: 116,017 camera searches tied to Kalamazoo-area agencies. The real story isn't just the volume, it's the gap between departments. Portage PD attached a case number to 100% of its searches. The agency that actually owns the cameras could only manage 9.7%.

That gap is the whole ballgame. A policy requiring a reason for every search is worthless if nobody checks whether a reason was ever written down. When 90% of searches in a database have no case number attached, there is no way for the public, the city council, or even internal auditors to know if that access was lawful, related to a real investigation, or just someone poking around. "Oversight" without an enforced audit trail is a press release, not a safeguard, and this video shows exactly how thin that line can be in practice.

Kalamazoo isn't unique — it's a preview of what records requests in your own city would likely show. If you want to see whether ALPR cameras are already logging your daily movements, check our camera map, and if your local department hasn't published its audit numbers, our take-action page has tools for filing your own request.