People, Products & Policy: The 3 P’s of Public Safety with Josh Thomas

Our Take

This one's straight from the horse's mouth: Flock Safety's Chief Communications Officer Josh Thomas sits down with the company's in-house podcast hosts, Jamie and Dalton, to talk up the "Three P's" — Product, People, Policy. It's polished, folksy, and full of burger talk to soften the pitch, but make no mistake, this is a company marketing its own surveillance product to skeptics, not an independent examination of it. When the people building and selling ALPR networks are also the ones explaining why their policies are ethical, you should read the whole thing as advocacy, not audit.

The '30-day retention became a national standard' line deserves scrutiny rather than applause. Retention windows are a policy choice Flock itself popularized and then presents back to agencies as the responsible default — a number that sounds modest until you remember it's 30 days of every plate, every vehicle, every location ping, stitched together across a growing nationwide camera network. 'Privacy-first design' from the company profiting off blanket location tracking is a marketing phrase, not a constitutional guarantee, and Fourth Amendment protections don't come from a vendor's internal ethics talk — they come from courts, legislatures, and the public pushing back.

That's the part this conversation glosses over: Flock 'tracks legislation' and 'educates city councils' because those are the exact venues where communities can still say no, or set real limits, before a camera goes up on their street. If you want to see how far this network already reaches near you, check our camera map, and if you want to push back on your own city council the way Flock is clearly working to influence them, our take-action page has the tools to get started.