Flock Safety Cameras TRAINED Cops to Track No Kings Protesters

Our Take

The YouTube channel Flock Off breaks down a 404 Media investigation showing Flock Safety allegedly trained law enforcement on how its ALPR network could be used to track public demonstrations, including the recent No Kings protests. This is the part of the surveillance pitch that never makes it into the city council slideshow: these cameras aren't just reading plates for stolen-car alerts, they're building a searchable record of who drove where, when, and how often — and apparently that includes people driving to exercise their First Amendment rights.

Flock has spent years marketing itself as a narrow public-safety tool, but training materials that walk cops through monitoring protest traffic tell a different story. Once a system is capable of flagging movement patterns around a political rally, the line between 'crime-fighting infrastructure' and 'protest surveillance network' gets very thin, very fast. And because this data is pooled across thousands of agencies, a local decision to install cameras can end up feeding a much larger, less accountable system that nobody specifically voted for.

We're glad reporters and independent creators like Flock Off are pulling these documents into daylight — it's exactly the kind of scrutiny this industry tries to avoid. If you want to see how dense this camera network already is near you, check our camera map, and if you think your city shouldn't be helping build a protest-tracking database, visit take action to push back.