Flock Helps Solve a Major Shooting Spree Case

Our Take

This clip is straight from Flock Safety's marketing team, not independent reporting. They clipped a moment from Marc Andreessen's appearance on Joe Rogan where he praises the company's role in resolving a shooting case in Austin, and now they're running it as an ad. That's worth remembering before you take the framing at face value — a tech company is naturally going to lead with its best anecdote, not the thousands of cameras logging law-abiding drivers who were never part of any investigation.

Andreessen is a venture capitalist with deep ties to the surveillance and policing tech sector, not a civil liberties expert or a disinterested observer. One case solved doesn't tell you how many plates were scanned, how long that data sat in a database, who else had access to it, or whether the same outcome could've been reached with a warrant and a tip instead of a network that photographs every car that passes by. Success stories are how this industry builds political cover for infrastructure that normalizes constant location tracking for everyone, suspect or not.

We're not denying that ALPR hits can help close cases. The question DeFlock keeps asking is whether that occasional benefit justifies a system that defaults to treating the entire public as potential suspects. Check our map to see how many of these cameras are already watching your own streets, and if you want to push back, our take-action page has concrete steps.