They moved the FLOCK CAMERA but it's still not CRASHWORTHY
The short version: Roadside safety advocate Steve Eimers shows that relocating a Flock ALPR pole didn't fix the underlying crashworthiness problem, exposing how fast these cameras go up with little regard for established safety engineering.
Our Take
Steve Eimers has spent years forcing transportation agencies to answer for roadside hardware that kills people in otherwise survivable crashes, and his latest look at a relocated Flock Safety camera pole is a reminder that the ALPR boom isn't just a privacy story — it's an infrastructure story too. Moving a pole a few feet doesn't make it crashworthy; it just moves the hazard. That a surveillance vendor's equipment can get planted along a roadway without the same scrutiny applied to guardrails and sign posts says a lot about how little oversight governs this industry's physical footprint, let alone its data practices.
We cover Flock mainly for what these cameras record and who gets access to it, but Eimers' work shows the same pattern from a different angle: speed of deployment outpacing basic accountability. Agencies and private contractors are racing to blanket roads with ALPR poles, and in the rush, nobody seems to be asking the boring questions — is this placement safe, is this contract transparent, is this system necessary. Credit to Eimers for making sure at least one of those boring questions gets asked on camera.
If you want to see how many of these poles have gone up near you, check our camera map, and if you'd rather do something about it than just watch the count climb, our take-action page has concrete steps for pushing back at the local level.
This is DeFlock The USA’s original commentary. The video above is the work of Steve Eimers Roadside Safety Advocate, published on YouTube — full credit to the creator.