Calls to remove Flock cameras grow as New Bedford City Council explores potential ban

Our Take

Credit to NBC 10 WJAR for staying on this story past the first blowup. A one-off angry council meeting is easy to write off as noise, but when residents and local leaders come back a week later still demanding the cameras get turned off, that's a sign the anger isn't fading — it's organizing. New Bedford is becoming a useful test case for what happens when a city actually has to reckon with a surveillance system it adopted with little public debate.

What's notable here isn't just the tension, it's the target: people aren't asking for better policies or more oversight, they're asking to remove the cameras entirely. That's a meaningfully different conversation than the usual 'transparency and guardrails' compromise Flock Safety and its police department partners prefer to offer. Bans and moratoriums put the burden back where it belongs — on the agencies to justify why a dragnet of license plate readers should exist in a neighborhood at all, not on residents to prove it's being abused.

If you're in New Bedford or anywhere nearby, check our camera map to see what's already logged near you, and if you want to push your own council the way New Bedford residents are doing, our take-action page has the tools to get started.