Axon is worse than Flock!

Our Take

We spend a lot of time on Flock because license plate readers are the most visible, most rapidly proliferating piece of the automated policing puzzle. But Manifestation Academy's video is a useful gut-check: Flock is one company doing one thing well. Axon is trying to own the entire pipeline — cameras, drones, TASERs, dispatch, AI-drafted police reports, records management, even prosecutor tools and VR training. When one vendor's software touches every stage of an encounter, from the moment a car is flagged to the moment a report lands on a prosecutor's desk, you get a closed loop where the same company profits from surveillance, use of force, documentation, and the legal outcome. That's not a conspiracy theory, it's just vertical integration, and it deserves the same scrutiny we give ALPR networks.

The through-line between Flock and Axon is the same one we keep hammering on: convenience sold to police departments becomes infrastructure sold to nobody's oversight. AI-generated police reports built from body cam audio raise obvious questions about accuracy, editorializing, and who actually reviews them before they become the official record. Add drones and TASER data into the same ecosystem and you've got a company quietly becoming the connective tissue of American policing, with very little public debate about whether that's a good idea.

Credit to Manifestation Academy for pulling these threads together in one place. If you're mapping out ALPR presence in your own area as part of understanding this bigger picture, check our camera map, and if you want to push back on this kind of unchecked expansion locally, our take-action page is a good place to start.