Brendan Keefe: Must See: Flock Safety Calls Police on Reporter Brendan — Part 2/7
The short version: Daily Beltway's Brendan Keefe gets police called on him for filming Flock Safety camera installs on a public road — a telling overreaction from a company that insists it's just helping cops.
Our Take
Credit to investigative reporter Brendan Keefe and the Daily Beltway team for this one. Standing on a public street, filming a crew bolt an ALPR camera to a pole, should be about as uncontroversial as journalism gets. Instead, according to this second installment of a seven-part series, Flock Safety's response was to call the police on him. That reaction says a lot more about the company's comfort level with scrutiny than any press release ever will.
Flock has spent years marketing itself as a quiet, neighborly infrastructure provider — just cameras helping local police solve crimes, nothing to see here. But when a reporter with a camera of his own shows up to document that infrastructure going up in public right-of-way, the instinct is apparently to summon law enforcement rather than answer questions. That's not the behavior of a company confident in the openness of its surveillance network; it's the behavior of one that would rather the installation process stay invisible.
This is exactly the kind of friction DeFlock The USA exists to document. Every pole, every camera, every install crew working in your town is public information whether or not the company wants cameras pointed at its own cameras. Check our map to see what's already gone up near you, and if you want to push back on 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 Daily Beltway, published on YouTube — full credit to the creator.