Mass surveillance by Flock cameras lead to innocent people being accused of crimes

Our Take

Credit to Matt Vititoe for pulling together a story that we think gets buried every time a city council approves another Flock contract: these cameras don't just watch, they accuse. A misread plate, a similar car, a database match with no human double-checking the logic, and suddenly an innocent person is being questioned by police for something they never did. That's not a hypothetical bug, it's the predictable outcome of running every car past automated flags with minimal oversight.

What makes this worse is the chain reaction. Once a Flock hit shows up in a police report, it tends to get treated like hard evidence instead of a probabilistic guess from a private company's algorithm. Officers act on it, prosecutors cite it, and the burden quietly shifts to the accused to prove the system was wrong. Mass ALPR networks were sold to the public as a tool for solving serious crimes, not as a machine that can casually put regular people in the crosshairs of a criminal investigation.

If you want to see how saturated your own neighborhood is with these cameras, check our camera map, and if you think your city shouldn't be writing blank checks to Flock without accountability, our take-action page has concrete steps for pushing back at the local level.