Flock Safety Scans 20 Billion Plates — Crime DROPS

Our Take

Twenty billion plate scans a month is a staggering number, and it's worth sitting with before we get to the crime stats. That's not a tool catching a handful of stolen cars — that's a dragnet logging the movements of nearly every driver in range of a Flock camera, law-abiding or not. Credit to the Flock Off channel for putting that scale front and center instead of burying it under the marketing pitch.

The bigger problem is the second half of the headline. Crime dropping in a city with Flock cameras doesn't mean Flock caused the drop — crime has been falling in plenty of places with zero ALPR coverage, for reasons that have nothing to do with mass license plate surveillance. Correlation gets sold as causation constantly in this industry's own press releases, and reporters and city councils keep repeating it uncritically. When the entity supplying the crime stats is the same one selling the cameras, that's not evidence, that's marketing copy.

What doesn't get mentioned in these pitches is who else gets access to 20 billion data points a month, how long it's retained, and how easily it can be shared across agencies and state lines. If you want to see whether this dragnet has already reached your neighborhood, check our camera map, and if it has, our take-action page has steps for pushing back at the local level.