Port St. Joe Police launch Flock Safety Transparency Portal for residents

Our Take

Credit to WMBB News 13 for covering this, but let's call the 'transparency portal' what it is: a dashboard, not oversight. Flock Safety loves handing these out to police departments because they generate good headlines while answering none of the hard questions — who else can query this data, how long is it kept, and what happens when a neighboring agency (or a federal one) comes asking to search it. A public-facing counter of scans doesn't tell residents any of that.

Port St. Joe is a small town, but eight ALPRs plus two live cameras is still a real surveillance network capable of building a detailed picture of who drives where and when. That capability doesn't shrink just because the department publishes a portal. Real transparency means public audit logs, a hard cap on data retention, an opt-out from Flock's national network sharing, and an actual policy residents can hold the department to — not a marketing feature bundled into the subscription.

Check our map to see what's already deployed near you, and hit take action for a template to push your own city council past the dashboard and into real policy.