ALPR & Flock Cameras: A Perspective
The short version: An Avondale councilmember's "nothing to hide" defense of Flock cameras shows how casually officials wave away mass surveillance as just another civic norm.
Our Take
Credit to Jen's Two Cents (Jen & Friends Podcast) for pulling this clip from the Avondale City Council record, because it says the quiet part out loud. Councilmember Max White's line — that we should all just get "comfortable" with surveillance, and that innocence buys immunity from it — is the same tired script local governments reach for whenever they need to wave through a Flock contract without real debate. It sounds reassuring. It isn't.
"Nothing to hide" was never really about hiding anything. It's about who holds the data, who can query it, how long it's kept, and who's accountable when it's misused — by an officer, a hacker, or a federal agency vacuuming up local ALPR feeds. Flock's network doesn't just watch people breaking the law; it logs everyone who drives past, law-abiding or not, and builds a searchable travel history that didn't exist a decade ago. Normalizing that isn't civic maturity, it's surrender dressed up as reassurance.
Avondale residents deserve a public meeting where elected officials treat this as the policy question it is, not a personality test about who has something to fear. Check our camera map to see what's already watching your own commute, and if you want to push back before your city council delivers the same line, our take-action page has the tools to start.
This is DeFlock The USA’s original commentary. The video above is the work of Jen's Two Cents. | Jen & Friends Podcast, published on YouTube — full credit to the creator.