Auburn police investigate theft of 3 license plate reader cameras
The short version: Someone in Auburn swiped three Flock cameras off their poles, and now police are working harder to find the camera thieves than they ever have to justify the surveillance itself.
Our Take
There's a certain irony in watching police scramble to solve the theft of license plate reader cameras with the same urgency they'd want those cameras to apply to catching a shoplifter. Suddenly the gear that quietly logs every car passing by, no warrant required, is the victim instead of the tool, and a few thousand dollars in missing hardware is getting more scrutiny than the millions of plate scans these systems rack up on ordinary drivers every year.
Flock and its city partners rarely publish real numbers on accuracy, misuse, or who's pulling data and why. But let three cameras go missing and you get a full ABC10 segment, a police investigation, and a public price tag. That imbalance says a lot about whose interests these systems are built to protect. Auburn residents deserve the same level of transparency about how their movements are tracked as they're getting about how the cameras themselves were stolen.
If you want to know whether your own neighborhood has one of these cameras watching the road, check our camera map, and if you'd rather your city not install more of them in the first place, our take action page has the tools to push back.
This is DeFlock The USA’s original commentary. The video above is the work of ABC10, published on YouTube — full credit to the creator.