Man accused of assaulting 14-year-old who missed the bus | FOX 5 News
The short version: FOX 5 Atlanta reports ALPRs helped detectives find a man accused of assaulting a missing 14-year-old, a case Flock will use to justify expanding its network nationwide.
Our Take
Credit to FOX 5 Atlanta for the reporting here. A child was allegedly lured and assaulted, and license plate readers reportedly helped detectives identify a suspect fast. Nobody at DeFlock The USA is going to pretend that's not a genuinely good outcome. Cases like this are exactly why Flock Safety and local police departments love to go to the press — a horrifying crime with a tidy, technology-assisted resolution is the best advertisement this industry could ask for.
But one solved case is not a policy. It's a sample size of one, pulled from a network of thousands of cameras that are scanning and storing the location of every car, every day, for everyone — not just people who abduct kids. The same database that flagged this suspect's plate also logged the movements of every innocent driver who happened past that camera that day, with no warrant, no court order, and often no public record of who else gets to query it, for what reason, or how long the data sits around. That's the trade nobody votes on explicitly: a handful of dramatic arrests in exchange for a permanent, searchable record of where you drive.
Departments rarely volunteer how many queries have nothing to do with violent crime, how data gets shared across agencies and states, or what happens when access is abused. If you want to see how dense this surveillance net already is in your area, check our camera map, and if you'd rather not take it on faith that this tech is only ever used the way it was in this one story, visit take action to push your local council for real transparency and limits.
This is DeFlock The USA’s original commentary. The video above is the work of FOX 5 Atlanta, published on YouTube — full credit to the creator.