Flock Camera Mystery, Towing Bill of Rights, Free Back-to-School Donuts
The short version: A Flock camera mysteriously appeared on Millcreek, Utah public property with no clear owner or authorization, exposing how little oversight these surveillance networks actually get.
Our Take
City Cast Salt Lake's Emily Means and crew stumbled onto a genuinely unsettling local story: a Flock Safety camera sitting on Millcreek city property that nobody in city government seems to have approved. No contract, no public vote, no clear answer about who installed it or why. That's not a technical glitch — that's the whole Flock business model working exactly as designed. These cameras spread fast, often through backroom deals between neighboring jurisdictions, HOAs, or private entities, long before residents or even local officials fully understand what's watching them.
This is precisely the accountability gap we track. A city can end up hosting a license-plate-reading dragnet on its own land without a council vote, a public hearing, or a data-sharing agreement anyone can point to. When even municipal staff can't say who put a camera up, you can bet the average resident driving past it has zero idea their plate is being logged, timestamped, and shared across a network they never consented to.
Credit to City Cast Salt Lake for digging into this one instead of letting it slide as a quirky local mystery. Stories like this are exactly why we built our camera map — so communities can see what's already been installed near them — and why we push people toward our take-action resources to demand real transparency before the next unmarked camera shows up on public land.
This is DeFlock The USA’s original commentary. The video above is the work of City Cast Salt Lake, published on YouTube — full credit to the creator.