Keeping Children Safe... by Spying On Them? #privacy #Flock #cctv #AI #security #camera

Our Take

The New Oil zeroes in on a framing trick Flock Safety and its police partners lean on constantly: wrap a surveillance network in the language of child protection and watch the questions stop. As the video points out, the pitch sounds unassailable — who's against keeping kids safe? But the actual mechanism is a permanent log of every vehicle's plate, location, and timestamp near schools, pickup lines, and neighborhood streets, retained and searchable by police long after the carpool has gone home.

That's the trick worth naming out loud. "For the children" has justified everything from metal detectors to warrantless data grabs, and ALPR networks are no exception. The actual safety case for blanketing school zones in plate readers is thin, while the privacy cost — a durable record of who drove where, built without a warrant or even reasonable suspicion — is concrete and already being abused in jurisdictions across the country. Credit to The New Oil for making that tradeoff plain instead of letting the marketing copy do the talking.

If a camera like this has gone up near your kid's school, it belongs on our map, and if you want to push back on the install before it's permanent, our take-action guide has the steps that actually work at school board and city council meetings.