22 Investigates Digging deeper into what Flock cameras are capturing

Our Take

Credit to WSBT-TV's 22 Investigates team for doing what more local newsrooms should be doing: pointing a camera at the cameras. "Are you being watched?" isn't a rhetorical question anymore — it's a records request away from an answer, and that's exactly the kind of digging this beat needs. Flock Safety has spread across the country by selling itself to city councils as a quiet crime-fighting tool, with little public debate about retention windows, data sharing agreements, or who else gets access to the logs of everywhere your car has been.

That's the part that keeps getting lost in the sales pitch: a network of plate readers isn't just watching for stolen cars, it's building a searchable timeline of ordinary people's movements — to church, to a clinic, to a protest, to a lawyer's office. Once that data exists, it doesn't stay contained to the original justification. Agencies share it, vendors retain it, and the public rarely gets a real accounting of how it's used until a reporter forces the issue, the way WSBT is trying to here.

If your town has this system running and nobody's asked these questions locally, that's on residents to push for now, not later. Check our camera map to see what's already been deployed near you, and use our take-action guide to start asking your city council the same questions this newsroom is asking.