Flock increases camera safeguards; Wisconsin police chief reacts

Our Take

Credit to WLUK-TV FOX 11 for covering Flock Safety's announcement of tighter guardrails — shorter default retention, mandatory audit assistance, and required case codes for vehicle searches. On paper, these are real improvements, and they only exist because of relentless public pressure after repeated stories of cops running plate searches for personal reasons, immigration enforcement, or out-of-state abortion investigations. That pressure is working. But notice the details: existing customers get to keep their old 30-day retention windows, and departments have until the end of the year to even bother adopting the new rules. That's not a safeguard, that's a grace period for business as usual.

Then you get Green Bay's police chief going on camera to say the changes don't affect how his department already operates, because an internal audit supposedly found nothing wrong. That's the same reassurance departments always give — self-audits conducted by the agency being audited, reviewed by no independent body, with no public access to the raw search logs. 'Trust us, we checked ourselves' is not oversight. It's a talking point.

Audit trails and case codes only matter if someone outside the department is actually looking at them, and right now that someone is almost never a judge, a city council, or the public. If you want to know whether your town is one of thousands quietly running one of these networks, check our camera map, and if you want to push your local government for real transparency instead of a press release, start with our take-action resources.