Disabled Vet, Lawyer, & others speak to city council against the use of Flock cameras.

Our Take

Credit to Metro TXK News for camping out at a city council meeting most outlets would skip. What happened in Texarkana is exactly the kind of grassroots pushback we want to see more of: everyday residents, not just policy wonks, standing up to say a private surveillance vendor has no business running unaccountable license plate cameras across their city.

The attorney's invocation of Carpenter v. United States is the sharpest part of this story. That Supreme Court case established that warrantless collection of location data implicates the Fourth Amendment — and a citywide ALPR network that logs every car's movements, timestamped and searchable, is precisely the kind of dragnet the Court was worried about. Add a disabled veteran willing to stand up and say this technology doesn't make him feel safer, just watched, and you've got a public comment session that should worry any council member who signed off on this contract without reading the fine print on data sharing, retention, and audit access.

This is playing out in city after city: officials approve Flock contracts quietly, then get blindsided when residents start asking who else can query the data and why there's no warrant requirement. If you want to see whether your own neighborhood is wired up, check our camera map, and if you're ready to push back like Texarkana did, our take-action guide has the tools to get started.