The Historical Echo Behind ALPR Surveillance
The short version: A political science professor argues Flock's ALPR rollout follows a historical script: new tech, old inequalities, sold as safety and normalized through uneven deployment.
Our Take
Professor Steven Keener's point, as relayed by the Chicago Justice Project, is one we keep coming back to: none of this is actually new. Swap out the technology and the pattern repeats — a tool gets introduced under the banner of public safety, gets deployed heaviest in the neighborhoods with the least political power to resist it, and within a few years it's just "how things are." ALPRs are the latest chapter, not a break from history.
What makes Keener's framing useful is that it reorients the conversation away from "is this camera accurate" and toward "who decided this camera goes here, and who didn't get a vote." Flock's own marketing leans hard on crime-fighting language, but the actual placement decisions happen behind closed doors between vendors and local officials, with almost no public input and even less independent auditing of where the data ends up. That's the historical echo — concentrated surveillance, diffuse accountability.
If you want to see whether that pattern is playing out in your own backyard, check our camera map to find out how many ALPRs are already watching your streets, and if the count is higher than you'd like, our take-action page has concrete steps for pushing back at the city council level before uneven becomes permanent.
This is DeFlock The USA’s original commentary. The video above is the work of Chicago Justice Project, published on YouTube — full credit to the creator.