Hit-and-Run Crisis: How One City Is Defying the National Average
The short version: Flock's own promotional video touts a police chief's 40% hit-and-run clearance rate, but a company-produced success story isn't independent evidence that mass ALPR surveillance is worth the privacy tradeoff.
Our Take
Notice who's telling this story: Flock. Not an independent auditor, not a peer-reviewed study, not even local press digging into the numbers — the vendor itself, packaging a police chief's quote into a highlight reel. That doesn't mean Chief Kennedy is lying about Quincy's clearance rate, but a single anecdote from a company-funded video is marketing, not proof that blanketing a town in license plate cameras is the reason crime got solved faster, or that the tradeoffs are worth it.
These numbers also almost never account for what's lost in the bargain: a permanent, searchable log of everywhere every driver goes, held by a private company and shared across a nationwide network that residents never voted on and can't opt out of. "Game changer" cuts both ways — it's also a game changer for stalkers with access, for data breaches, for immigration sweeps, and for any future administration that decides your travel history is useful to them.
Before your town signs the next Flock contract based on a success story like this, find out if the cameras are already watching your commute on our camera map, and check our take-action page for how to push back at the city council level.
This is DeFlock The USA’s original commentary. The video above is the work of Flock, published on YouTube — full credit to the creator.