Cancel Flock and Axon shows up on the same poles

Our Take

Credit to Verified Privacy VPN (vp.net) for catching what a lot of victory laps missed: Syracuse's Flock cancellation wasn't a win against ALPR surveillance, it was a vendor switch. The same poles, the same plate-scanning function, now running on Axon's hardware instead. If the goal was less surveillance, the city didn't get it — it just got a different logo on the box.

This is exactly the trap we keep warning about. Local officials love announcing they've "cancelled Flock" because it makes for a clean headline, but if the underlying policy problem — warrantless mass collection of everyone's location data, indefinite retention, vague data-sharing agreements — isn't addressed, swapping vendors changes nothing. Axon has its own ALPR ambitions and its own data practices to scrutinize. Communities need to stop treating this as a brand loyalty fight and start demanding actual limits: no camera without a public vote, hard retention caps, audits, and real consequences for misuse.

Check our camera map to see what's actually watching your streets, whatever nameplate is on it, and hit take action if you want to push your city council past the vendor-swap shell game and toward real accountability.