Flock Cameras: Surveillance or Public Safety? Haverhill MA Residents Challenge the System
The short version: Haverhill, MA residents packed City Council to grill officials on Flock ALPRs, and Al Pereira's footage shows what real local pushback looks like.
Our Take
Al Pereira's coverage of the Haverhill City Council meeting captures something we love to see: ordinary residents showing up, asking hard questions, and refusing to accept a rubber-stamped surveillance contract just because a police department says it's for "public safety." That phrase gets used to justify a lot of camera networks, but it rarely comes with a straight answer about who gets access to the data, how long it's stored, or what happens when the system misfires and flags an innocent driver.
This is exactly the kind of grassroots friction that keeps Flock Safety's expansion in check. City councils across the country are quietly approving these deployments with little public debate, and Haverhill's residents deserve credit for forcing the conversation into the open. Whether or not the cameras stay, the fact that citizens are demanding transparency on retention policies, audit trails, and third-party data sharing is a win for accountability.
If you're in Massachusetts or anywhere else wondering whether Flock has already landed in your town, check our camera map to see what's nearby, and if you want to push back the way Haverhill did, our take-action guide walks you through how to raise these questions at your own council meeting.
This is DeFlock The USA’s original commentary. The video above is the work of Al Pereira, published on YouTube — full credit to the creator.