A City Pays $2,500 A Year For One Flock Safety Camera

Our Take

Credit to Sourced Business for doing the unglamorous but essential work of actually reading a city contract line by line. $2,500 a year sounds almost quaint until you realize that's per camera, and Indio isn't stopping at one. Multiply that out across a five-year term and you get $586,750 — money that doesn't buy the city a single piece of infrastructure it owns, just a perpetual subscription to a private company's surveillance network.

This is the business model Flock Safety doesn't put in the press release: recurring revenue dressed up as public safety spending. No city council votes on "mass surveillance subscription service" — they vote on "crime-fighting technology," and the invoice shows up every year after the ribbon-cutting is forgotten. Meanwhile the data these cameras generate keeps flowing to a company with its own retention policies, its own data-sharing agreements, and its own incentive to expand the footprint year over year.

If your town is weighing a similar contract, or you just want to see how many of these cameras are already watching your commute, check our camera map. And if you'd rather your city spend six figures on literally anything else, our take-action page has the tools to make that case at your next council meeting.