Does Flock make communities safer?

Our Take

Credit to GBH News for booking this one right: a police chief who presumably wants more cameras on more corners, sitting across from Kade Crockford of the ACLU of Massachusetts, who's spent years documenting how these systems actually get used once the press releases stop. That's the debate that almost never happens at city council meetings, where Flock sales reps control the narrative and skeptical questions get treated as anti-police rather than pro-accountability.

The "does it make us safer" framing is exactly the right question, and exactly the one Flock Safety doesn't want asked rigorously. Police departments love to cite anecdotes about a single recovered stolen car or a hit on a BOLO, but anecdotes aren't evidence of net public safety gains, and they say nothing about the privacy cost paid by every single driver who gets logged, timestamped, and geolocated just for driving through Providence on an ordinary Tuesday. That data doesn't disappear after the "good" use case — it sits in a database, accessible to other agencies, with retention and audit policies that vary by department and are rarely enforced consistently.

If you're in Rhode Island or anywhere else wondering whether these cameras have already shown up on your commute, check our camera map to see what's been documented near you, and head to our take-action page if you want to push your local council to actually scrutinize these contracts instead of rubber-stamping them.