Are flock cameras an invasion of privacy? Police say they help solve crimes

Our Take

Credit to abc27's WHTM for putting the question to viewers directly: are these cameras an invasion of privacy? But notice how the segment is structured — police get to make the case for Flock, and the "privacy" side gets reduced to a vague feeling rather than a set of facts about retention windows, who can query the data, or how often these networks share plate reads across jurisdictional lines without a warrant. That's the pattern in nearly every local TV piece on this technology: law enforcement's crime-solving anecdotes are treated as self-evidently sufficient justification for a system that logs the movements of every driver, regardless of suspicion.

"Police say they help solve crimes" is doing a lot of work in that headline. Of course they do — a dragnet that photographs every car on a road will occasionally turn up a hit. The actual debate isn't whether ALPRs can be useful in an investigation; it's whether blanket, suspicionless surveillance of an entire community is the price we should pay for that occasional usefulness, and who gets to audit the system once it's installed. Those are the questions local coverage rarely pushes police to answer on camera.

If you want to see whether this is already happening in your neighborhood, check our camera map, and if you'd rather not just watch the debate play out on the news, our take-action page has concrete steps for raising it at your next city council meeting.