Flock Safety: 20 Billion License Plate Scans Monthly #shorts
The short version: A Senate inquiry into Flock Safety's 20 billion monthly plate scans — roughly 57 per American — confirms what we've been saying: this is mass surveillance, not just traffic enforcement.
Our Take
Credit to Auditing Reno 911 for putting a number on what many of us have felt driving through town after town dotted with these cameras: 20 billion license plate scans a month, or about 57 per American. That's not a typo, and it's not hyperbole — it's the scale Flock Safety has built, largely without most residents ever voting on it or even knowing it exists until they spot a camera on a pole.
The fact that the US Senate is now asking questions is a sign that this conversation is finally moving out of local city council meetings and into the national spotlight. Flock has spent years marketing itself as a crime-solving tool for small police departments, but a surveillance network that logs tens of billions of movements monthly isn't a niche local experiment anymore — it's critical infrastructure for tracking where every car, and by extension every person, goes. That data doesn't stay local either; it's shared across jurisdictions, raising obvious questions about who gets access, how long it's kept, and what happens when it's misused or breached.
Numbers like this make the abstract concrete. If you want to see how close this network already is to your own neighborhood, check out our camera map, and if you're ready to push back against unchecked ALPR expansion in your city, our take-action resources are a good place to start.
This is DeFlock The USA’s original commentary. The video above is the work of Auditing Reno 911, published on YouTube — full credit to the creator.