El Paso Police chief says Flock camera halt will impact response times

Our Take

KTSM 9 News reports that El Paso's police chief is sounding the alarm now that the department's Flock Safety camera network has been halted, framing the pause as a direct hit to response times. It's a familiar script: every time a city reconsiders ALPR contracts, the warnings about rising crime and slower response follow almost on cue. We'd ask for the actual data behind that claim before taking it at face value — how many cases, how much time, verified how?

Response time is a real concern, but it shouldn't be used to shut down legitimate questions about a surveillance system that logs the movements of every driver, innocent or not, often without clear rules on who can access that data or for how long. A pause is exactly the moment when a city should be auditing those policies, not rushing back to default settings because a chief says so.

If you want to see whether El Paso's cameras — paused or not — are still part of the national network, check our camera map, and if you think your city council should be asking harder questions before any ALPR system comes back online, our take-action page has tools to help you push for real transparency.