Horizon City PD continues to use Flock cameras amid backlash
The short version: As Texas and El Paso drop Flock, Horizon City PD digs in, with its chief defending the cameras on KTSM 9 News despite mounting privacy backlash.
Our Take
Credit to KTSM 9 News for putting Horizon City Police Chief Marco Vargas on camera to answer for his department's decision to keep running Flock Safety ALPRs even as the state of Texas and the city of El Paso walk away from their own contracts. That contrast says a lot: when bigger agencies with more scrutiny and more lawyers start backing off, a smaller department doubling down is worth watching closely.
The chief's pitch will sound familiar to anyone who's followed this fight — officer safety, solving crimes, "nothing to hide." But the actual concerns raised by residents and by state and city officials who pulled out aren't really about any one case. They're about a permanent, searchable record of everyone's movements sitting on a vendor's servers, accessible to networks of agencies far beyond Horizon City, with minimal independent oversight of who queries it and why. A police chief saying the tool is useful doesn't answer whether the public ever consented to that level of tracking.
Horizon City residents who want to see what's actually watching their streets can check our camera map, and anyone ready to push back on a local ALPR contract — including ones renewed in defiance of statewide trends — should start with our take-action resources.
This is DeFlock The USA’s original commentary. The video above is the work of KTSM 9 NEWS, published on YouTube — full credit to the creator.