Why Flock license plate readers are under fire despite police praise

Our Take

News 12's local dive into the Flock Safety debate captures exactly the tension we track every day: police departments love to cite recovered cars and cleared cases, but they rarely volunteer how long that plate data sits in a database, who else can query it, or what happens when the AI misreads a plate and sends an officer to the wrong car with guns drawn. "Fewer stolen vehicles" is a real number. So are the wrongful stops. Both belong in the same conversation, and too often only one gets airtime at the press conference.

What's notable here is that lawmakers are finally catching up to what residents and privacy advocates have been saying for a while — that accountability isn't optional and shouldn't require a public records lawsuit to enforce. Transparency about data retention, audit logs, and interagency sharing agreements should be baseline requirements before a single camera goes up on a pole, not an afterthought bolted on after backlash. Credit to News 12 for putting both sides of this fight on the record instead of just running the department's highlight reel.

If there's a Flock camera reading plates in your town, chances are you haven't been told where it is or who has access to that feed. Check our camera map to see what's already been deployed near you, and if you want to push back on unchecked expansion, our take-action page has concrete steps for making your local council actually answer for this stuff.