Decatur teen found safe after Flock cameras help track down former Tennessee deputy

Our Take

Credit to 48 News for the reporting: a missing teenager was found safe, and by the outlet's account, Flock camera hits played a role in narrowing down where to look. Nobody at DeFlock USA is going to spike the football and say a safe recovery doesn't matter. It does.

But "it worked this time" is doing a lot of lifting in stories like this. Every one of these feel-good clips is also a marketing beat for Flock Safety and the police departments that buy its systems, and it conveniently skips the part where the same network logging this teen's movements is logging everyone else's too — with no warrant, no notice, and often no public record of how long the footage sits in a database or who else gets to query it. A win in one case doesn't tell you how the system behaves in the other 99.9% of scans that have nothing to do with a missing person.

If you want to know whether your own plate is getting vacuumed up every time you drive to work, check our camera map for Flock locations near you, and see what you can do about it on our take action page.