All about Flock cameras in Fort Collins
The short version: The Coloradoan's local report on Fort Collins' 15 Flock cameras shows the same script playing out everywhere: police tout convenience, residents raise privacy alarms, and nobody's running the real numbers.
Our Take
Credit to the Coloradoan for doing what local newsrooms should be doing everywhere: pointing a camera at the cameras. Fort Collins' 15 Flock Safety ALPRs may sound modest compared to deployments in bigger metros, but the pattern is identical. Police frame the system as a force multiplier for solving crimes, while residents who ask basic questions about retention, access logs, and mission creep get treated as an afterthought in the story rather than the point of it.
What's missing from these local segments, almost without fail, is scale. Fifteen cameras in one city isn't an isolated tool, it's a node in a nationwide network that Flock's own data-sharing agreements connect to thousands of other agencies. A plate scanned in Fort Collins can end up queried by a department you've never heard of in a state you've never visited, with no warrant and often no public record of why. That's not a hypothetical, it's documented in how the network is built to function.
If you want to see what's actually watching you, check our camera map before you take the city's word for how limited this network is. And if your town is debating a Flock contract or renewal, our take-action page has the public records requests and talking points that get real answers instead of press-release reassurances.
This is DeFlock The USA’s original commentary. The video above is the work of Coloradoan, published on YouTube — full credit to the creator.