An insane police news week (especially when it comes to Flock cameras)
The short version: KAWPS The Podcast rounds up a chaotic week of police news dominated by Flock Safety ALPR controversies, underscoring how routine this surveillance scandal cycle has become.
Our Take
KAWPS The Podcast calls this an "insane week" for police news, and notably, Flock cameras ate up most of the airtime. We'd push back on one word though: insane. At this point, a week without fresh Flock controversy would be the anomaly. Mission creep, data sharing overreach, agencies caught using the network for things they swore they wouldn't — this is the baseline now, not an outlier.
What's valuable about roundup shows like this is the pattern recognition. When you stack up multiple Flock stories in a single week, side by side, it gets a lot harder to write off any single incident as a one-off bad actor or a misunderstanding. It starts looking like what it is: an infrastructure problem. Thousands of cameras, loosely governed, feeding a searchable database that outlives whatever narrow justification got it installed in the first place.
Credit to KAWPS for keeping this on the radar alongside the rest of the week's police news cycle — it's exactly the kind of visibility that keeps these systems from operating in the dark. If you want to see how dense this camera network has gotten in your own area, check our map, and if you're ready to push back locally, our take-action page has concrete steps for showing up at your next city council meeting.
This is DeFlock The USA’s original commentary. The video above is the work of KAWPS The Podcast, published on YouTube — full credit to the creator.