2 towns reject state police request to install Flock cameras

Our Take

Credit to NBC 10 WJAR for covering a story that doesn't get nearly enough airtime: elected local officials actually telling state police "no" when asked to blanket their towns in Flock Safety cameras. This is the exception, not the rule. In most of the country, these requests sail through planning boards and town councils with little more than a rubber stamp, often because nobody in the room understands what a network of automated license plate readers actually does once it's wired into a statewide or even national database.

What makes this case notable is that it shows pushback works. When a state police agency comes asking for blanket permission to install surveillance infrastructure in a community, that's a request, not a mandate, and local governments have more leverage than they often realize. Two towns said the juice isn't worth the squeeze, whether over cost, data-sharing concerns, or just basic skepticism about handing a third-party company access to everyone's travel patterns. That's the kind of friction this fight needs more of.

Every town that says yes adds another node to a surveillance net that doesn't stop at the town line, flock data gets pooled, shared, and queried by agencies far outside the jurisdiction that approved the cameras in the first place. If you want to see how dense this network already is in your state, check our camera map, and if your town has a Flock proposal coming up, our take-action page has what you need to show up and push back before the vote, not after.