From ShotSpotter to ALPRs: The Expansion of Police Surveillance
The short version: Chicago Justice Project's interview with Professor Steven Keener shows Flock's ALPR rollout following ShotSpotter's exact playbook: hype, poor neighborhoods, then scrutiny.
Our Take
Credit to the Chicago Justice Project for pulling in Professor Steven Keener, whose research on "Surveillance Inequality" lays out something we've been saying for a while: Flock Safety isn't selling a new idea, it's running an old playbook. ShotSpotter promised data-driven safety, got rolled out disproportionately in poorer and heavily policed neighborhoods, and then spent years fending off questions about accuracy, cost, and whether it actually reduced crime. Sound familiar?
The parallel matters because ShotSpotter eventually lost contracts in major cities once the accountability questions piled up high enough. Flock is still in its honeymoon phase with most city councils, riding the same "innovative public safety investment" rhetoric before the independent audits catch up. Keener's point about geography isn't abstract — where these cameras go says a lot about who gets watched, who gets stopped, and who gets to opt out of that scrutiny entirely. Check our camera map to see if that pattern is playing out where you live.
If ShotSpotter taught us anything, it's that these systems don't get rolled back because vendors admit fault — they get rolled back because residents and councils demand the data and the oversight. That's the fight ALPRs are heading into now, and it starts with knowing where the cameras are and pushing back at the local level through our action resources.
This is DeFlock The USA’s original commentary. The video above is the work of Chicago Justice Project, published on YouTube — full credit to the creator.