Kalamazoo voted on its Flock contract. The forfeiture account sits outside the vote.
The short version: Kalamazoo's 7-0 vote on its $99,900 Flock deal looks like accountability, but Magnetic Norse shows the forfeiture fund paying for it sits outside that oversight.
Our Take
A unanimous city commission vote sounds like democracy working as intended. But as Magnetic Norse lays out in this video, the real question isn't whether Kalamazoo's seven commissioners approved 40 Flock cameras — it's where the $99,900 a year actually comes from. When that money flows through a civil asset forfeiture account, you get a funding stream that never has to survive a budget hearing, a public comment period, or a re-vote. The surveillance expands, but the usual checkpoints for stopping it quietly disappear.
This is the pattern we keep seeing nationwide: local officials treat a single contract vote as the full extent of public oversight, while the money mechanics underneath get structured to dodge exactly that kind of scrutiny. Forfeiture funds are especially convenient for this because they're already insulated from normal appropriations fights — cash seized from residents, recycled into the cameras watching those same residents. Credit to Magnetic Norse for pulling this thread instead of taking the 7-0 vote at face value.
If you want to see whether Kalamazoo's cameras — or ones near you — are part of this growing network, check our camera map, and if your city is about to sign or renew a Flock contract, get ahead of it with our take-action resources.
This is DeFlock The USA’s original commentary. The video above is the work of Magnetic Norse, published on YouTube — full credit to the creator.