HOAs Built the Panopticon

Our Take

RCDS's framing is the part of this story that doesn't get enough attention: Flock didn't start with a police department asking for a surveillance network, it started with homeowners associations worried about porch pirates and a stranger's car idling too long on the cul-de-sac. That's the pitch that works — small, local, relatable. But HOAs don't have privacy officers, public records obligations, or city council oversight. They're the perfect soft entry point for a company that wants cameras on every corner with nobody asking hard questions until the data's already flowing into a shared, searchable, cross-jurisdictional system.

What starts as "let's catch whoever's keying cars in the parking lot" ends up as a plate-reading backbone that police departments, federal agencies, and now apparently HOA boards themselves can query, often with little transparency about who's looking, why, or how long the scans are kept. The video's point about "convenient crime stats" cuts right to it — these systems get justified after the fact by cherry-picked success stories, while the millions of innocent people swept up in the dragnet never show up in the pitch deck.

This is exactly why we built our camera map — so residents can see whether their own neighborhood association quietly signed up for this before they ever got a vote. If you're in an HOA that's considering Flock, or already has it, check our take-action page for how to push back before the panopticon finishes installing itself one subdivision at a time.