Cape Girardeau police defend use of Flock cameras

Our Take

Credit to KFVS12 | Heartland News, Weather & Sports for getting Police Chief Adam Glueck on camera defending Cape Girardeau's 30-camera Flock Safety network. But "invaluable" is doing a lot of work in that sentence, and it's the kind of soundbite that tends to end the conversation instead of starting it. Invaluable for solving which cases? Invaluable compared to what cost in resident privacy? Those questions rarely make the evening news cut.

This is the same script playing out in small and mid-size cities across the country: a department rolls out dozens of always-on plate readers, leadership touts a few success stories, and the broader questions about retention windows, data sharing with other agencies, audit trails, and mission creep get waved away with a word like "invaluable." Thirty cameras in a city the size of Cape Girardeau is not a trivial footprint — that's a dense enough grid to reconstruct a lot of ordinary people's daily movements, not just catch the rare stolen car.

We'd rather see reporting that pushes past the chief's talking points and into the actual policy: who can query this data, how long it's kept, whether it's shared with ICE or other outside agencies, and what oversight exists if it's misused. Until local coverage does that, it falls to residents to check for themselves. Look up whether Cape Girardeau's cameras are already logged on our map, and if you want to push back on unchecked ALPR expansion in your own town, our take action page has concrete next steps.