Flock and Speeding Cameras:How'd we go from defunding the police to installing a police state?

Our Take

Credit to The Davis Download for naming the irony plainly: a lot of towns that spent 2020 arguing about police budgets have spent the years since quietly wiring up Flock Safety camera networks that track every plate that passes through. No town hall vote on facial-recognition-adjacent tech, no real debate about retention periods or who gets database access — just a sales pitch about 'solving crime' and a line item in a budget nobody reads closely.

That's the trick with ALPR expansion. It never gets framed as a surveillance policy decision, it gets framed as a tool, like a better streetlight. But a tool that logs your car's location every time you drive past a Flock pole, shares that data across agencies in other states, and sits with minimal independent auditing is not a neutral traffic gadget — it's infrastructure for a police state that doesn't need a single dramatic law to arrive, just a few thousand quiet procurement approvals.

If the hosts' back-and-forth has you wondering whether your own city council ever had this conversation out loud, check our camera map to see what's already been installed near you, and head to take action for ways to push back before the next pole goes up.