'Krampus' crashes Mass. Select Board meeting to support Flock cameras

Our Take

When mocking your town's surveillance rollout requires a Christmas demon costume to get a word in, that tells you something about how local government handles these votes. Credit to MassLive for capturing it: the Krampus bit at Billerica's Select Board meeting was satire, but the laugh lines land because the underlying story is so familiar. Boards vote to bolt ALPR cameras onto intersections with minimal debate, Flock's sales reps promise it's all about recovering stolen cars, and residents who show up to ask basic questions about retention, access, and oversight get treated like the weird ones in the room. Sometimes it takes a guy in a demon suit to flip that script.

Satire works here because the actual policy conversation so rarely happens in public. Who can query the data. How long it's stored. Whether it gets shared with other agencies, ICE, or out-of-state police. Those questions don't go away just because nobody on the dais wants to ask them, and a costume bit shouldn't be the only pushback a town gets before cameras go live. Billerica is one more town on a map that keeps growing, often without the public hearing it deserves.

If you want to see whether your own commute is already being logged node by node, check our camera map, and if you'd rather not wait for a holiday demon to show up at your Select Board meeting, there are concrete steps on how to push back before the vote happens, not after.