Most Surveilled City in America Has the Worst Crime Rate #shocking #atlanta
The short version: Business Reform's data dive finds Atlanta's camera-saturated streets haven't translated into the safety the surveillance-industrial complex keeps promising.
Our Take
Credit to the channel Business Reform for doing what Flock Safety and city hall rarely do themselves: actually checking the numbers. Their breakdown lines up Atlanta's camera density against FBI Uniform Crime Report data and finds the correlation city officials love to imply — more cameras, less crime — just isn't holding up. That's worth sitting with, because "public safety" is the entire sales pitch for every ALPR contract signed in this country.
We've said it before: surveillance vendors sell deterrence, but deterrence is a hard thing to prove and an easy thing to assume. When a city with one of the densest camera networks in America also posts rough crime stats, it should prompt real scrutiny from city councils before the next renewal check gets cut to Flock. Instead, what usually happens is more cameras get installed as the default response to any bad headline, regardless of whether the last round of hardware did anything measurable.
If you want to see how saturated your own city has become, check our camera map — Atlanta is far from alone. And if your local government is about to approve another ALPR contract on the promise that it'll cut crime, our take-action resources can help you ask for the data before you ask for the budget.
This is DeFlock The USA’s original commentary. The video above is the work of Business Reform, published on YouTube — full credit to the creator.