More Than Cameras: How Network Surveillance Tracks Movement at Scale

Our Take

This is the point we keep hammering: a single ALPR bolted to a pole is a nuisance, but a few thousand of them wired into one shared network is a surveillance system that no city council ever explicitly voted for. Professor Steven Keener's research, cited in this Chicago Justice Project clip, gets at exactly that shift — Flock Safety isn't selling cameras, it's selling access to a searchable, cross-jurisdictional map of where your car has been. One department's "local safety tool" becomes every participating agency's lookup table.

That's the part local officials rarely explain when they approve a Flock contract. The pitch is stolen cars and Amber Alerts; the reality is a data-sharing pipeline that can be queried by agencies hundreds of miles away, with little public visibility into who's searching, why, or how long the trail persists. Keener's framing of "surveillance inequality" is worth sitting with too — these networks don't get deployed evenly, and the communities that get blanketed first are rarely the ones with the political capital to push back later.

Credit to Chicago Justice Project for putting academic rigor behind what a lot of us have been saying anecdotally. If you want to see how far this network already reaches near you, check our camera map, and if your city hasn't had this conversation in public yet, our take-action guide has the tools to start it.