Denver CANCELS Contract With Flock – But There’s A Twist! w/ Kit Cabello

Our Take

Kudos to Misty Winston and Kit Cabello of Hard Lens Media for cutting through the headline on this one. Douglas County dropping Flock for Axon isn't a privacy win, it's a rebrand. The cameras keep scanning, the plate data keeps flowing into some company's servers, and the public still has zero say in how long it's stored or who gets to query it. Whether the logo on the pole says Flock or Axon, the surveillance architecture — mass, warrantless tracking of every car that passes — stays exactly the same.

The hacking angle they raise deserves more attention than it gets. These networks were sold to small towns as a crime-fighting convenience, not as critical infrastructure, yet they're increasingly treated like a honeypot of location data on every driver. Pair that with first-responder drone programs and you've got agencies stacking surveillance layers faster than anyone is writing rules to govern them. 'Trust us, it's for public safety' doesn't hold up when the vendor itself can't guarantee the system won't be breached or misused by the officers who have access to it.

This segment is a good reminder that the fight isn't about picking the 'nicer' surveillance company — it's about whether these camera networks should exist at all without real oversight. Check our map to see what's watching your own neighborhood, and hit up take action if you want to push back before your county makes the same Flock-to-Axon shuffle.