How Savannah Police Keeps the City Safe for Residents and Visitors Alike

Our Take

This one isn't a third-party investigation — it's a Flock Safety production, which means the framing is exactly what you'd expect: historic streets, reassuring narration, and zero mention of retention windows, audit logs, or who else gets access to Savannah's plate-read data. "21st-century policing" is doing a lot of work in that description, and it conveniently skips the part where every car passing through one of the oldest cities in America gets logged, time-stamped, and stored regardless of whether its owner is suspected of anything.

Savannah draws huge tourist traffic, and that's exactly the kind of jurisdiction where blanket ALPR coverage quietly normalizes surveillance of people who have no idea they're being tracked block by block. A company-produced video showing smiling officers and charming architecture isn't the same as public disclosure of camera counts, vendor contracts, or interagency data sharing — the things residents actually need to evaluate whether this system is worth the tradeoff.

If you want to see what's actually been deployed in Savannah or your own city, check our camera map, and if you'd rather push back than just watch the ad, our take-action page has concrete steps for engaging your local council.