Flock Cameras Are Everywhere — Crime-Fighting Tool or Surveillance Network?

Our Take

Credit to the Flock Watch channel for pulling together a snapshot of just how fast this fight is moving. A few months ago, ALPR expansion was a quiet line item in county budget meetings. Now you've got a sitting member of Congress, Thomas Massie, floating federal action, local governments in places like Knox County debating whether to blanket more roads with cameras, and departments like Roseville's own numbers raising questions about how accurate these "crime-fighting" systems actually are in practice.

That's the pattern we keep seeing: the pitch is always narrow — find the stolen car, catch the hit-and-run — but the rollout is never narrow. It's roadside cameras multiplying block by block, data quietly shared across jurisdictions, and accuracy claims that don't hold up once someone actually pulls the numbers, as apparently happened in Roseville. Vandalism incidents popping up around the country aren't random acts of destruction; they're a signal that plenty of ordinary people feel like this surveillance was installed without their consent and without a real public debate.

If you want to know whether your own neighborhood already has one of these cameras, check our map — and if you'd rather do something about it than just find out, our take action page has concrete steps for pushing back at the city council level before the next contract renewal sails through unnoticed.