Franklin and Douglas Ep 95 | Are Flock Cameras About Safety… or Surveillance?

Our Take

Credit to the Franklin and Douglas Podcast for putting the Flock debate in front of a casual audience that might never read an ACLU brief or a city council agenda. That's exactly how this issue spreads — not through policy wonks, but through regular people asking the same question hosts Franklin and Douglas raise in their title: is this about safety, or is it about surveillance? The honest answer is usually "both, and the second part is doing more work than vendors admit."

That framing matters because Flock Safety and departments that deploy its cameras almost always lead with crime-fighting anecdotes — a recovered stolen car, a located suspect — while staying quiet about the system underneath: a growing, searchable database of every plate that passes a reader, timestamped and stored, often shared across jurisdictions with little public oversight. A single camera catching one bad guy is a good headline. A statewide network logging the daily movements of millions of innocent drivers is a different story entirely, and it's the one Flock would rather not have top billing.

If this episode has you wondering what's actually watching your street, check our camera map to see documented ALPR locations near you, and visit our take-action page for ways to push back at the local level — because the conversation Franklin and Douglas started shouldn't end when the episode does.