Fighting Flock: Some take stand against cameras

Our Take

Credit to WAVY TV 10 for getting actual residents on camera pushing back, because most local coverage of Flock Safety rollouts reads like a press release from the police department. What's happening in Hampton Roads is the same script playing out in hundreds of towns: a city council quietly approves a handful of cameras as a 'crime-solving tool,' and a year later neighbors realize every trip to the pharmacy, the church, or a protest is now logged, timestamped, and sitting in a database that outlives whatever case it was supposedly collected for.

Law enforcement's defense is always the same — these cameras solve crimes. Sure, sometimes they do. But that's not the question residents are actually raising, and WAVY's reporting captures that tension well. The question is who else gets access to that data, how long it's retained, whether it's shared across state lines or with federal agencies, and what happens when there's no judge or warrant anywhere in the process. A network that can reconstruct anyone's daily movements isn't a neutral tool, it's an infrastructure, and infrastructure doesn't go away just because the crime rate ticks down for a quarter.

If you're in Hampton Roads or anywhere else wondering if you're already being tracked, check the map to see what's been documented near you, and if your city is debating a Flock contract, our take-action page has the questions you should be asking your council before they sign.