One of the best arguments against Flock you'll watch

Our Take

More Perfect Union caught something that should worry every city council watching its own Flock rollout: a packed room of Fridley, Minnesota residents who showed up expecting to talk about car theft and left learning their local ALPR network had been tapped for immigration-related searches. This is the pattern critics have warned about since day one — these systems get sold as tools for finding stolen cars and Amber Alerts, then quietly become backdoors for federal agencies chasing entirely different goals with zero local oversight.

What makes this video worth watching is the raw, unscripted moment of a community realizing that "who has access to this data" is not a hypothetical question — it's a growing list of outside agencies, some with agendas the town never signed off on. Flock's own audit trails are the only reason residents found out at all, which tells you how opaque these networks are by default. Multiply Fridley by the thousands of jurisdictions running Flock cameras and you get a national surveillance dragnet with no consistent rules about who gets to query it or why.

Credit to More Perfect Union for putting cameras in that meeting room and letting residents' own questions carry the argument. If you want to see whether your neighborhood is already wired into this network, check our camera map, and if you're ready to push back at your next council meeting, our take-action guide has the questions to start with.