Columbia County officials discuss Flock cameras in area
The short version: WTEN reports Columbia County residents and Hudson's mayor are pushing back on Flock cameras in Greenport, exposing how ALPR surveillance ignores town lines.
Our Take
WTEN's report out of Columbia County captures something we see over and over: nobody votes on these cameras, but everybody lives with them. Greenport installs a network of Flock ALPRs, and suddenly Hudson's own mayor, Joseph Ferris, is telling residents the spillover affects them too — because license plate readers don't respect municipal boundaries, even when public accountability does.
That's the core problem with how Flock Safety gets deployed across New York and the rest of the country. A village board or a sheriff's office signs a contract, and overnight every driver passing through — commuters, delivery workers, people visiting family — gets logged into a database that neighboring towns never approved and often don't even know exists. Calling for 'transparency' after the fact, as officials in this story are doing, is a start, but it's backwards. The time to demand answers about data retention, access logs, and sharing agreements is before the cameras go up, not after residents start asking why a system in Greenport is tracking people in Hudson.
This is exactly why we built our map — to show the real footprint of this surveillance network stretching far past any single county line. Check it at the map, and if Flock is creeping into your area without a public conversation, see what you can do about it on our take action page. Credit to WTEN for getting local officials on record.
This is DeFlock The USA’s original commentary. The video above is the work of WTEN, published on YouTube — full credit to the creator.